Review of Structural Social Determinants of Health in Early Childhood Development

Development is a dynamic and continuous phenomenon that is under the influence of various factors forming a complicated multidimensional system together. Any impairment in these factors can lead to impaired development in children, which is one of the most common problems in children. Therefore, this study provides a brief overview of these factors and the way they affect early childhood development. A brief review was performed in databases including Google scholar, PUBMED, Proquest, SID, Magiran, Iranmedex, Irandoc with following keywords: child development, income, occupation, education, employment, boy, girl, gender, sex, social class, Race and Ethnicity. All of article was reviewed then categorized based on WHO model. Among the papers reviewed, most of the studies were about employment, education, and income and most of them investigated these risk factors in terms of socioeconomic status. Structural factors of social determinants of health had a close relationship with each other, and they had affected development through each other. Given that, only few studies on structural factors, except for socioeconomic factors, have been conducted and little attention has been paid to the way these factors affect child development, further studies in this area are required to propose a model in order to better understand the interaction between these factors.