Q&A – Hirokazu Yoshikawa

Hirokazu Yoshikawa studies how public policies and programs—particularly those related to immigration, early childhood, youth development, and poverty reduction—shape human development throughout the lifespan. As a community and developmental psychologist, his work demonstrates that early childhood investments have a lasting positive impact on individuals’ lives. He has contributed extensively to global research focused on designing targeted interventions that strengthen family caregiving, improve physical environments, and promote healthy early childhood development.

The central theme of my career has been finding effective ways to create social impact and large-scale changes in human development research. A major focus has been drawing global attention to the importance of high-quality public early education. The rapid expansion of primary education under the Millennium Development Goals[1] taught a key lesson: increased access does not guarantee better learning. This highlighted the need to invest in early childhood education as the foundation for learning. Education must begin before primary school, bringing the science of early childhood development firmly onto the global policy agenda. This work originated over 30 years ago with an article showing that combining early support for caregivers with quality early education could reduce behavioral problems and delinquency by offering cumulative protection.

[1] https://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/

Yes, I brought the situation of undocumented immigrant parents and their young children on the scope of public and policy debates in the United States. In my 2011 book Immigrants Raising Citizens, I demonstrated how parents’ undocumented status can affect children’s development from birth. This work received wide attention, contributed to Supreme Court briefs concerning mixed-status families, and helped shape policies aimed at protecting undocumented parents of U.S. citizen children.

In one major project on young children in humanitarian and refugee settings, we worked with Rohingya families in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, one of the world’s largest refugee camps. Knowing the challenges these families face due to displacement and trauma, we used participatory methods like interviews, focus groups, and ethnographic work to hear directly from parents. Their insights are helping us work with partners on the ground to improve early childhood programs and design more child-friendly spaces in the camps, making sure that interventions truly met the needs of the community.

The studies in the refugee camp are providing us with many other exciting insights about the power of playful learning in the context of high war-driven and current adversity.

One major project on young children in humanitarian and refugee settings involved delivering culturally adapted educational media, like a pan-Arab version of Sesame Street, to crisis-affected areas such as Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, and Bangladesh, reaching over 23 million children. In Lebanon, a remote 11-week preschool program using these media and other playful activities helped children improve literacy, numeracy, and social-emotional skills, with results similar in magnitude to the effects of a full year of in-person preschool.

What matters most to me in these projects is building genuinely collaborative, long-term relationships between practitioners, researchers, and policymakers. Meaningful research questions do not arise solely from academic inquiry. Instead, they are shaped directly by the experiences and priorities of those working on the ground.

This approach leads us to ask questions such as: How can we improve quality in large-scale systems? How can we maximize the impact of public programs on children and youth? or How can we make smarter investments in children’s learning and development—whether through the education system or by supporting caregivers?

In my work, I prioritize community-engaged research, focusing not only on scientific publications and scholarly exchange but also on achieving tangible impact in policy and practice. This approach is becoming more common in the social sciences, as more researchers start to value deeper community engagement.

My background in counseling has been particularly valuable in this context, enabling me to listen closely to practitioners and policymakers who, ultimately, share the same goals: improving human well-being and maximizing developmental potential across the lifespan. Sustaining reciprocal relationships and genuinely listening to the perspectives and priorities of community partners is essential to greater and more sustainable impact.

For example, in my recent work in Bangladesh, I and colleagues at NYU’s Global TIES for Children Center have partnered with NGOs working in the Rohingya camps, using ethnography, workshops, and collaborative design sessions to understand how children and youth experience life in these densely populated conditions. Together with Rohingya participants, we co-created visions of ideal camp environments and programs.

What stood out was the strong desire among the Rohingya to take on greater leadership in shaping these programs, rather than simply remaining recipients of NGO-designed interventions. This insight was striking and represented a meaningful contribution to the study of child development.

I’ve learned a great deal from outstanding mentors over the years, and I feel a strong sense of responsibility to support others in the same way. I actively seek to learn from scholars around the world, and I value the diverse approaches they bring to research and community engagement. The realities and innovations from the global South are all too often overlooked in everyday scientific life. As a scholar based in a high-income country, I believe that I have just as much to learn from colleagues in low- and middle-income countries as they might from me. Rather than viewing this as a one-way process of capacity building, I see it as a model of capacity exchange.

I believe that this way of working and thinking is essential for building a more equitable and globally informed scientific community.

It really was a case of serendipity. I made the decision to switch from the humanities and music to psychology in my late twenties. In one of my first psychology classes as a master’s student, I came across a ten-year evaluation of an early childhood program, and it showed remarkable effects on family well-being and child development. That became the topic of my final paper for that class, mainly because it was one of the topics left after others had made their choices. However, that paper ended up becoming my first published article, summarizing exciting and emerging findings from the prior few decades. That experience sparked my interest in the field of early childhood development and program evaluation, and I’ve continued working in that field for the past 30 years.

New projects and career paths are often less about careful planning and more about chance encounters and the relationships you build along the way. One such moment came about 20 years ago, when Niobe Way, a professor at NYU, called me with an offer to conduct a field study on child development in China. She asked me whether I could travel that very same weekend to Nanjing – an offer I couldn’t pass up. That project, which looked at the impact of economic change on child and youth development in the city of Nanjing, marked the beginning of my global work. That study is now starting its 20-year follow-up assessments of children who are now in their early adulthood! Building on the research I had done in the United States, I became increasingly open to collaborations in other regions after this experience in China. The more I engaged with colleagues around the world, the more I realized how much we could learn from one another. What began as a locally grounded focus gradually evolved into a passion for global cooperation, shaped by the people I met and the opportunities that arose along the way.

First, I aim to improve the broader physical environment for children in humanitarian settings, with a particular focus on Rohingya refugee camps. Our research has shown that caregiving in these contexts is a collective, household-based endeavor rather than the responsibility of a single parent. With this in mind, I intend to design and implement new studies examining how caregivers in an extended sense – entire households — can be supported through environmental and program interventions. By translating our findings into practical applications, we will work to develop and test holistic approaches that treat the household as the primary unit for early childhood development programs based on cultural practices and the role of extended family, rather than focusing solely on individual parents.

Second, I plan to address the protection of children and youth in immigrant families in the United States. While research-practice and research-policy partnerships have been widely discussed, there remains a significant gap in understanding how research-advocacy and research-litigation partnerships can be structured and leveraged for greater impact. I intend to initiate new research exploring these reciprocal partnerships, with the aim of strengthening collaborative models between researchers, advocates, and legal professionals. This work will contribute to the development of evidence-based strategies to safeguard the rights and well-being of children and youth in immigrant families.