Guidance for the health sector to partner with parents and families for early childhood development

Interventions reviewed include informing, demonstrating, coaching, encouraging, supporting, and complimenting parent–child interactions that recognise infants’ emotional states; are responsive to young children's attempts to communicate with caregivers and stay close through facial expressions, gestures, and vocalisations; are receptive to children's efforts to explore the world by reaching for and manipulating objects; and support and enable children to acquire skills and attain greater independence by, for example, sitting and feeding themselves. [...]nutritional supplementation alone does not improve young children's development but does so effectively when combined with parental support to improve responsive caregiving and early learning.11 The new WHO guideline joins other WHO evidence-based documents for improving the healthy growth of young children, including Recommendations on Antenatal Care for a Positive Pregnancy Experience,12 Counselling of Women to Improve Breastfeeding Practices,13 and Postnatal Care of the Mother and Newborn.14 Our experience from low-income and middle-income countries is that, without ongoing local expert research and clinical resources, WHO guidelines are valued by governments in their attempts to maximise the effectiveness and reach of their constrained health services and are usually adopted quickly. The scientific findings from the three Lancet Series1–7 on the foundations of human capital development, the roadmap for uptake and scale-up of early childhood development interventions in the Nurturing Care Framework,15 and their synergy with the values of the Sustainable Development Goals have fuelled interest in early childhood development.16 Furthermore, there is demand by countries and development agencies for direction on how to proceed in advancing early childhood development.