Systems approaches for uncovering mechanisms of structural racism impacting children's environmental health and development

Current approaches to identifying the impacts of structural racism on human development focus on downstream consequences or developmental outcomes rather than the upstream processes that create and perpetuate those negative consequences. Yet, the hallmarks of complex problems like structural racism include feedback relationships linking factors, path dependence, dynamics, non-linear effects, time delays, counterintuitive, and policy resistance. Pollutant exposures and their resulting deleterious effects on child health and development are among the downstream effects of structural racism. System dynamics modeling, a branch of systems science, provides developmental and environmental researchers with approaches to analyze complexity and integrate evidence from multiple disciplines through a common language and visualization of systems of structural racism. In this commentary, we introduce core tenets of system dynamics modeling as means of delineating the institutional and structural processes of environmental racism from the measurable consequences to child development; highlight specific implications of system dynamics modeling for developmental sciences; use the ongoing environmental health crisis in Flint, MI as a case example of how system dynamics modeling can be used to examine the impacts of structural racism on child development.