What are those and why are those important?

The developmental ecosystem has essentially four layers.

The top layer, what you might consider the above-the-waterline observable layer, is the declines in health that we went through already.

Beneath that is development, how health is changing over time in response to a child's interactions with their family.

family, with their friends, with the built environment, with those things in their immediate ecosystem.

But then even deeper are the institutions, the natural systems, and the social systems that actually determine which developmental processes a child will experience.

But grounding it all is the values that we hold as a culture and the stories that we tell based on those values.

What do those strategies involve?

What do we know about why this is happening?

So that is the big question and it's a complex answer.

There is no single factor that's causing this generalized deterioration.

People like to point out that the food environment is, um, not healthy or that kids are spending more time on social media, but that's just the proximate set of causes.

There are also environmental causes that are important.

What's happening to families? Families are experiencing a lot of stress.

What's happening in schools? What's happening with school start time? What's happening with the climate changes that's actually now having impacts on both acute and chronic conditions? And then even deeper than that is the political economy of our nation that allows one in seven children to live in poverty, and also the cultural values that don't place children at the forefront of what we view as important to a society.

What do you make of the approach so far that this HHS and the Trump administration writ large has been, uh, taking to children's health?

are, like, are actually manifesting themselves in the bodies of American children?

I love the pool, um, metaphor.

I, I think that would be fair to say, Meghna, but I think that's not the full story.

I think that, um, as you point out, it's the, the pool or what we call the developmental ecosystem that's failing kids.

So it's across the board.

It is the policies and the politics at the national level.

It's also the hypergrowth capitalist political economy that we have that monetizes children's attention.

I don't know if we have a cultural pill to solve that disease.