The Importance of Responsive Care Skills in a Child’s Early Stages of Development
The design challenge has been a non-linear, open-ended, and rewarding experience so far. I am apart of the group 1 team and our project is “Developing a responsive care intervention for teenage mothers in Kenya and helping them back into their community.” In our project, our partners who we are working with work at a residential center for teenage mothers in Kenya and they proposed three deliverables to us. The first objective is developing an intervention that improves the responsive care skills of the teenage mothers that enhances the teen mother’s ability and awareness of their baby’s physical and emotional needs. For example, responsive care skills include: feeding the baby when they are hungry, having the baby nap when they need sleep, or picking the baby up when they want to be held. The second goal of our collaboration with our partners is to integrate coping skills into the intervention from the first objective. Finally, we were asked to develop a research study surrounding the intervention to measure the teenage mother’s improvement in these areas and also assess burnout in the teenage mothers, both for intervention strategies and also preventive work. With the timeline of the project needing to fit within the framework of our academic semester, we, unfortunately, aren’t able to fully complete the last objective and are keeping our focus on the responsive care skills and intertwining that with coping skills in the intervention strategy we are creating.
The reading “The Rights of Children from Optimal Development and Nurturing Care Pediatrics” by Uchitel, et al., 2019, expresses the importance of the role of the mother in the early stages of development of the baby. The benefits of mothers engaging with things such as responsive care with their baby are the following, “Studies on childhood brain development have revealed that positive experiences, such as responsive caregiving, stimulation and enrichment, opportunities for early learning, and social interaction promote learning and growth of the brain.” When a baby’s needs are met from birth with their caregiver, in this case, their mother, it can lead to the positive physical and emotional health of the baby. The authors Uchitel, et al. also highlight that environmental factors influence the likelihood of these positive experiences to occur and that everyone has the right to things such as “proper nutrition, and clean water” whereas and “poverty and socioeconomic status can prevent that” in reference to developmental growth.
Through our process of brainstorming and creating an intervention that focuses on these topics, my group and I have talked about the importance of routine in conjunction with responsive care skills. We have decided to create a guided journal that is focused on psychoeducation for the teenage mothers that are both informative and explorative. The journal will give information about responsive care skills, while also having space for the mother to have the freedom to write, be creative, etc. The spaces within the journal for reflection serves the purpose of allowing room to write down both emotions the mother has been experiencing throughout the day, but also write down how the baby responded to the responsive care skills done by the mothers throughout the day. For example, this could be the mother drawing what the baby’s facial response looked like after feeding the baby.
Coming into the project, it is important for my group and myself to remain humble in this and remember that we are working with individuals from a different culture than us. We did not want to step on the toes of our partners we are working with and create a prototype that is addresses programs, interventions, and activities that they are already integrating. I think meeting with our partners has been really helpful, specifically learning communication is key in a project like this. I have also learned that while accepting that you may not be able to meet all of the objective goals of your partners is hard, it is better to focus on one goal and make it more effective than spreading yourself too thin in order to accomplish all the goals halfway. I am looking forward to further creating the prototype of the guided journal with my group and fully presenting it to our partner.
References:
Uchitel J, Alden E, Bhutta ZA, et al. The Rights of Children for Optimal Development and Nurturing Care.Pediatrics. 2019;144(6):e20190487
