Promoting a nourishing environment for early childhood development with improved relationships community workforce and primary caregivers
Abstract
Care for Child Development (CCD) has been shown to effectively provide caregivers with education to enable them to provide a nurturing, stimulating care environment for the young child, thus increasing the childs developmental potential. However, there is also recognition that maternal, paternal and/or caregiver mental health and wellbeing plays an important role in caregiving capacity and child development outcomes. CCD has been adapted in many contexts. Yet very few CCD programmes address caregiver well-being directly, instead most focus on early stimulation, problem solving and providing advice directly related to the childcare context. Caregiver mental health, stress and challenges to caregiver wellbeing are not fully addressed by this child-centric approach.
This programme responds to the needs for effective ECD intervention raised in the current literature. Firstly, there is a need to enhance the CCD package with an add on module to address maternal needs which are suitable for implementation in highly adverse low resourced contexts; it provides support and responds to caregiver mental health needs; while remaining sustainable and feasible within the broad population-based modality of CCD. Secondly, there is a need to ensure that stakeholders consultation is undertaken to inform this enhancement of CCD and the development of the add on module in order to make sure that content, training approaches, minimum standards and implementation guidelines are culturally and context sensitive; and in a format which encourages multi-sectorial integration and suited for large scale implementation. Thirdly, there is a need to conduct research that demonstrates the feasibility, acceptability and preliminary effectiveness of the enhanced CCD package to respond to the mental health needs of caregivers. Such evidence will inform and facilitate wider scale implementation of the augmented package across the regions, including WCAR.
