On March 23, 2010, President of the United States, Mr. Barrack Obama, signed The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. It is a $1 trillion, historic programme that includes Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting Programs. Grants will be made to states to deliver early childhood home visitation services to promote improvements in maternal and prenatal health, infant health, child health and development, parenting related to child development outcomes, school readiness, and the socio-economic status of such families, and reductions in child abuse, neglect, and injuries.

The Home Visiting Coalition had been advocating for legislation that would “establish the first dedicated federal funding stream to support parents with young children through quality home visitation at the state and local level.” While many had hoped to see parenting education as a part of such legislation, the inclusion of home visiting in a health reform bill is nevertheless considered a step in the right direction.

The Caribbean Child Support Initiative, CCSI, has been facilitating the Roving Caregivers Programme (RCP), a home visiting approach to support parents/caregivers in their role of raising children by bringing services to them in the home. RCP in the Caribbean is an informal early childhood development programme that seeks to reach children birth to three years of age who do not have access to any formal early childhood education, early healthcare, using early stimulation for the children and parenting education to form the core of the programme. The CCSI facilitates the RCP (replicating the programme in Jamaica) in Grenada, Dominica, St. Lucia and St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and provides technical support to Belize. Between 2004 and December 2009, nearly 10,000 children and parents in five countries were benefitting from services introduced by the CCSI. In 2008, one hundred and fifty-one (151) Rovers (home-visitors) in 4 countries held 137 community meetings and facilitated 2,280 parent consultations.

While CCSI cannot itself directly facilitate national policy development, it can lay the groundwork, through its advocacy and communications strategies. As such, CCSI advocates that governments incorporate the organisational, structural and methodological lessons from RCP into their mainstream approach to the early childhood and social service provisions and environment. It is hoped that Caribbean governments will be encouraged by the US experience with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act - that early childhood development is about citizen entitlement, and the state can act to ensure funding to support parents with young children through quality home visitation.

The CCSI over the next two years intends to encourgae the dialogue to consider convergence and integration using the RCP-type concept as the frame of reference. It is desirable that the RCP be linked to national social and economic development policies and priorities and should be positioned in Government service provision, within an integrated policy framework. Even where State or community policy fosters the expansion of day-care services and even in the context of centre-based child services, the methodologies, organisational principles, synergies and curriculum of the RCP can enrich that provision.

According to Dr. Didacus Jules, Registrar and CEO of the Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC) in his recent position paper on the RCP, this home-visiting model is “as refined as it can get,” with the missing link being policy. Dr. Jules argues that social service delivery in the region can and should be rationalised, with a convergence of resources, emphasising that the RCP-concept can be applied in a number of sectors (health, education, social development etc.). The RCP has demonstrated the ways in which related services can be incorporated into the provision of child support thus maximising services or facilities already existing services. CCSI is currently piloting an initiative in St. Vincent and the Grenadines called ECHO – Early Childhood Health Outreach, which uses the home-visiting principles of the RCP in the healthcare sector.

Dr. Jules states that to the extent that the RCP is able to share overhead and fixed costs with other Early Childhood Development projects, the cost per participating child decreases. Further, the overhead costs per child will decrease substantially when the number of participating children goes up.

There is therefore a need to safeguard programmes like the RCP and ECHO, because no single programme in isolation can overcome the multiple challenges facing high risk families. To be effective, home-visiting programmes must have strong connections to a full system of family-strengthening supports, including other child and youth services, in the community.

A concerted, multi faceted approach that includes home-visiting programmes as one strategy in the prenatal to pre-kindergarten continuum can go a long way to promote a healthy, emotionally and socially well-developed child. And in the long term, an emotionally and socially well developed country.

For more information on the full US bill go to: http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/pdf/Senate_health_care_bill.pdf?tag=contentMai Home visiting begins on page 561, and continues through to page 588 (Subtitle L—Maternal and Child Health Services SEC. 2951. MATERNAL, INFANT, AND EARLY CHILDHOOD HOME VISITING PROGRAMS.)

Emphasis has always been placed on a child’s ability to read and write, but research has now indicated that speaking with your child may put your child at a great advantage.

A child’s rate of vocabulary growth is strongly influenced by how much parents talk to their children. While it is understood that differing backgrounds can play a role in their development, indications are that children from professional families gain vocabulary at a quicker rate than their peers in working class and welfare families.

According to the “Research Brief – Meaningful Differences in Everyday Experiences of Young American Children,” forty-two families, over a period of two and half years were monitored once a month for an hour. Three types of families were analysed: professional, working class and families on welfare. The children, who were ten months old at the start of the programme, ranged in socio-economic status, sex, birth order, number of siblings and family structure. All families were considered “well-functioning”.

It was discovered that though all the children started to speak around the same time and developed good structure and use of language, children in professional families developed a larger cumulative vocabulary.

This had a lot to do with the number of words the child heard daily. In professional families, children heard an average of 2,153 words per hour, while children in working class families heard an average of 1,251 words per hour and children in welfare families heard an average of 616 words per hour. When that is put into yearly figures it works out that by kindergarten, a child from a welfare family could have heard 32 million words fewer than a classmate from a professional family.

By the age of three a child from a professional family had a cumulative vocabulary of about 1100 words, as compared to the working class child with 750 words and the child from a welfare family had a vocabulary of only 500 words.

It was also discovered that children in professional families heard a higher ratio of encouragements to discouragements than their working class and welfare counterparts.

Based on these findings, the authors reached the conclusions that “the most important aspect of children’s language experience is its amount” and “the most important aspect to evaluate in child care settings for very young children is the amount of talk actually going on, moment by moment, between children and their caregivers.”

Hart, Betty, Risley, Todd R., (1995), Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children.

• Another effort to encourage media to keep a focus on young children and family support is the Oscar van Leer Journalism Award 2010. Three fellowships will be awarded, consisting of high-level professional training in skills related to journalism about early childhood development and children’s rights.

• A four-week, expenses-paid professional training course in the Netherlands conducted by the Radio Netherlands Training Centre will be provided to the successful candidates. The fellowship is intended for ambitious young journalists with an interest in children’s issues.

• You need not be an expert in children’s issues already – that’s why training is being offered. But you need to have an interest in learning more about the issues faced by disadvantaged young children, and the ways in which media coverage can raise awareness and shape opinions of them.

• Applicants must be connected to a reputable media outlet, either as an employee or as a frequently published freelance contributor, and must intend to continue to pursue a career in the media. The fellowship is open to journalists in all forms of media, including print, radio, television and web.

Website: http://scholarshiponline.info/netherlands-oscar-van-leer-fellowship-2009-for-journalists/

Powerful evidence from one study after another proves that high quality care in the first years of life can greatly reduce the risk that today’s babies and toddlers will become tomorrow’s violent teens and adults. High quality early learning and care is one of the most powerful weapons against crime, while poor early childhood education multiplies the risk that children will grow up to be a threat to society.