Nepal, July 21 -- A generation of Nepali children is growing up healthier, better schooled than any before it and also the loneliest. This paradox belongs at the centre of our new government's thinking, yet it is entirely absent from national conversation. We count enrollment, literacy and remittances, but fail to ask whether the web of caring adults, on which every childhood depends, is holding or fraying.

My four decades of work on child development across three continents revealed one pattern: Development brings survival and schooling, then inadvertently and quietly strips away the human bonds essential to children's wellbeing. The Nepal I grew up in was desperately poor by most economic measures, but its children were rarely alone. F...