TABLE 2.

Actionable Key Characteristics of Life Course Interventions

Characteristic	Description
Initial
Optimization focused	Aimed at optimizing health trajectories rather than simply preventing or treating specific health problems.
Developmentally focused	Grounded in the knowledge that health development takes place from preconception through adulthood and that each stage affects health development in subsequent stages. Strongly process oriented.
Longitudinally focused	Aimed at improving health reserves and resilience in early life that will contribute to disease prevention later in life.
Strategically timed	Targeted to a critical or sensitive period of development, or a transition or turning point, to intervene with maximum efficacy and impact. Timing is multidimensional, including duration and frequency of intervention, as well as stage of the life course.
Multilevel or holistic	Designed to improve >1 aspect of the ecosystem in which children are born, live, learn, and grow; considers social and cultural context.
Vertically, horizontally, and longitudinally integrated	Aimed at integrating services, programs, and other protective factors, including those outside the medical care sector, at all levels, to create a seamless, forward-leaning, health-optimizing system.
Additions
Addresses emerging health capacities	Designed to support and enable processes leading to the development of capacities for positive health, not just management or prevention of disease.
Strengths based	Builds on child, youth, family, and community strengths to build health reserves and to create adaptations to circumvent challenges.
Collaboratively codesigned	Designed by stakeholders (individuals, families, communities) and professionals working together.
Family centered	Recognizes and supports the unique role of families as incubators of early health development, with potential to build family resilience and buffer children from adverse experiences.
Antiracist	Incorporates antiracist principles and considers the potential role of and effective responses to racism.
Equity focused	Supports health equity, recognizing that different circumstances and contexts warrant different intensities of intervention. Designed to help the most disadvantaged individuals.