Recent efforts to promote child survival and development internationally have focused new attention on the importance of the household as a mediator of both environmental risks and programmatic interventions to promote better health.

In this paper, we introduce a theoretical framework, the « developmental niche, » derived from studies of children's behavior and development in different cultural contexts, as a tool for analyzing the household production of health.

The developmental niche is conceptualized in terms of three basic components:

• (1) the physical and social settings of the child's everyday life;

• (2) culturally regulated customs of child care and child rearing;

• and (3) the psychology of the caretakers.