A precious toolkit intended for health workers and other counsellors in the Latin American and Caribbean region, aiming to help families to build stronger relationships with their children and solve problems in caring for them at home. A set of manuals full of reach information, exercises, tests and games, with the purpose of teaching the caregivers how to recognize the needs of the children and stimulate their learning during the first years of life.
The need of PAHO and UNICEF was also to have for these manuals a more playful feeling compared to the previous version, with a clean and friendly layout and easy readability.
The whole kit in pdf will be soon published on the organizations’ websites.
Illustrations by Elda Broglio.
Globally over 200 million children do not reach their developmental potential in the first 5 years because they live in poverty, and have poor health services, nutrition and psychosocial care. These disadvantaged children do poorly in school and subsequently have low incomes, high fertility, high criminality, and provide poor care for their own children.
The health sector in countries has the capacity to play a unique role in the field of early child development because the most important window of opportunity for ensuring optimal development and preventing risk of longterm damage is from pregnancy through the first five years of life. Therefore health care encounters for women and young children are important opportunities to help strengthen families’ efforts to promote children’s early development and may represent the only real chance for health professionals in developing countries to positively influence parents of young children.*
