Developmental literacy and epistemic dignity as primary child protection: a developmentally staged, disability-inclusive public-health framework for preventing adverse childhood experiences.

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), toxic stress, relational insecurity, and structural adversity are major public-health concerns for children and adolescents, but ACE evidence should not be treated as an individual diagnostic score or deterministic prognosis. This Hypothesis and Theory article proposes developmental literacy and epistemic dignity as linked upstream constructs for primary child protection. Developmental literacy is defined as developmentally staged and disability-inclusive neurobiopsychosocial knowledge and skills concerning bodies, emotions, stress, attachment, co-regulation, play, nutrition, safety, rights, boundaries, non-violent care, and help-seeking. Epistemic dignity refers to the supported capacity and right of children-including preverbal, disabled, neurodivergent, and communication-diverse children-to have bodily, emotional, relational, play-based, and communicative signals interpreted with seriousness, humility, and appropriate response. Drawing on research on ACEs and positive childhood experiences (PCEs), nurturing care, relational health, health-promoting schools, social and emotional learning, mental-health literacy, sexuality/safety education, child participation, epistemic injustice, disability studies, implementation science, and critiques of ACE and trauma-informed practice, the article develops a universal, proportionate, relationally safe, anti-bias, and non-coercive public-health framework. It argues that early-childhood services, schools, pediatric/public-health touchpoints, caregiver support, and community systems can provide age-appropriate developmental knowledge without turning schools into clinics, teachers into trauma detectors, or children into individual risk scores. The framework does not recommend routine individual ACE-score screening in schools as a default practice; it supports ethically governed, service-linked pathways for recognizing distress and unmet support needs. Coercive reproductive control is treated only as a rejected comparator because it targets reproductive status rather than modifiable developmental environments, support access, and institutional trust. The article concludes with safeguards and testable hypotheses for evaluating developmental literacy, epistemic dignity, relational safety, accessibility, help-seeking, response quality, caregiver support, referral continuity, and unintended harms.