Scientific Progress in Mapping the Relational Ecology of Early Child Development: A Systematic Scoping Review

The development of secure relationships between children and their adult carers, across the earliest years of life, emerges within a multifaceted and complex relational ecology. Here we present findings from a systematic scoping review designed to map the extent to which the relational ecology of child-caregiver relationships across early life (from conception to age 3 years) has been studied. A first phase of the review searched for studies that used applied social network analysis (SNA) to measure the relational ecology. A second phase extended the scope to studies of associations between individual elements of the relational ecology and the early child-caregiver relationship. Searches were conducted between February and September, 2023, rerun in March 2025and in total, yielded 11,226 articles for screening. We found no studies using SNA to investigate the relational ecology of early child-caregiver relationship development. We did, however, find 122 studies that examined individual predictors across the relational ecosystem of the early child-caregiver relationship. Most studies focused on the family microsystem and in particular the mother–child relationship. Few studies examined other aspects of the microsystem, or higher levels of the relational ecosystem (meso-, exo- or macrosystems). Our findings highlight that much of the broader relational ecology of early child relational health development continues to be neglected in observational research. Future research should consider using novel methods like SNA to capture and explain interconnections between relationships at all levels of the relational ecology of early child-caregiver relationship development.