|
 Researchers examined the impact of home visits at age 3 for children
in India, Pakistan, and Zambia who were either from low-income
families or households with slightly more resources.
When parents received home visits to teach them age-appropriate
activities to do with their babies and toddlers to encourage healthy
development, the children from low-income families experienced much
more dramatic gains than their peers from households with more
resources, the study found.
It’s possible this happened because the parents with more resources
had more access to things like toys, books, crayons, and paper and
spent more time talking to their children, said lead study author
Carla Bann of RTI International Research in Triangle Park, North
Carolina.
“The lower resource parents were encouraged to interact with their
children and provided examples of what this interaction might look
like, and given suggestions on how to turn common objects into toys
and other play objects that could take the place of toys the higher
resource families might have had available to them,” Bann said by
email.
“Without this encouragement, they may have spent less time focusing
on their children, Bann added.
More than 200 million children under age 5 worldwide don’t reach
their developmental potential because of poverty, malnutrition, poor
health and non-stimulating home environments where adults don’t
spend enough time speaking, reading or playing with them, Bann and
colleagues note in the journal Pediatrics.
To see how home visits might help even the odds for some of the
world’s most deprived children, researchers compared developmental
outcomes in two groups: 146 children whose parents received home
visits with coaching on how to help kids build needed skills, and a
control group of 147 kids whose parents also received home visits
but didn’t get the coaching on how to improve child development.
On average, mothers in the study were around 25 years old, and
slightly more than half of them had no formal education.
Families with low resources were more likely to be from Zambia, have
no formal education, be married, have lacked prenatal care, and
delivered babies at home with a traditional birth attendant.
In families with more resources, children experienced significant
improvements in cognitive development over the course of the study,
regardless of what type of intervention parents received during home
visits.
When families had fewer resources, however, coaching during home
visits was associated with much bigger gains in cognitive skills
than kids experienced when parents lacked this assistance.
[to top of second column] |
The study only assessed children until age three, when developmental
assessments might not predict long-term outcomes, the authors note.
Larger benefits from the home visits might also be noticed by the
time children reached school age, the researchers point out. In many
parts of the world, family resources are a major predictor of school
enrollment and academic achievement.
In the U.S. and other developed nations, many low-income families
still have more resources than the parents who participated in the
study, said Dr. Benard Dreyer, president of the American Academy of
Pediatrics and author of an accompanying editorial.
For any family experiencing stress and struggling to make ends meet,
however, home visits that teach parents how to interact with
children may help improve child development, said Dreyer, also a
researcher at New York University School of Medicine.
“When you are focused on putting food on the table or figuring out
how to keep the heat on or being hounded by your landlord, families
are not likely to have the bandwidth to say I am going to play with
my child today,” Dreyer said in a phone interview.
Home visits may succeed because they help reduce stress, teach
parents how to do activities with their kids, and provide materials
to do these activities, Dreyer added. The visits parents received
were brief, intermittent and focused on simple activities, he noted.
“That alone made a difference,” Dreyer said.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1M2S6Rt Pediatrics, online March 14, 2016.
[© 2016 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2016 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
 |
