We have long known that poverty is a major challenge to children and a major challenge throughout life. We\u2019ve learned that poverty is a challenge to health. So it\u2019s a challenge to morbidity, it\u2019s a challenge to mortality, and as we have studied it, we\u2019ve learned that individuals who are born into poverty continue to have a risk of earlier mortality and morbidity even if they are not poor as adults. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So it illustrates that it\u2019s more than just living in a low-income community, not having access to services. We\u2019ve also learned that it applies to children\u2019s development. So the children who are born into poverty have a higher risk of having development that is a bit more delayed than children who are born into higher socioeconomic families. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But what we have learned is that there are interventions that can mitigate, overcome some of those aspects of poverty. And the earlier some of these interventions start the better off they are. Well what are these interventions? You know, these interventions are very basic kinds of things that children need. They\u2019re very early parenting interventions. So they\u2019re ensuring that children have the nutrition that they need when they need it. They really start with things like breastfeeding and moving into following the guidelines of nutrition so that it\u2019s complementary feeding with healthy food, staying away from junk food and developing healthy habits that you have food when you are hungry, you stop eating when you\u2019re full and we don\u2019t use food to manipulate behaviour. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s also the kinds of early nurturance – that means hugging kids, being responsive to kids, being kind to children, listening to them, having back and forth kinds of exchanges. Children are able to follow sound, follow sight from the first day of life. If you hold a baby in midline and call the baby\u2019s name, you could say anything for that matter, but the baby will turn and find your eyes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So children will respond, infants will respond and having those responses back and forth has an impact on early brain development. So even given the consequences that we have in \u2013 with poverty, there are things that we can do, things that do not necessarily cost any money. Talking to a baby, singing to a baby, playing with a baby and ensuring that the baby is well fed do not necessarily cost anything, but the payoff can be a major boost to the child\u2019s development. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We have long known that poverty is a major challenge to children and a major challenge throughout life. We\u2019ve learned that poverty is a challenge to health. So it\u2019s a challenge to morbidity, it\u2019s a challenge to mortality, and as we have studied it, we\u2019ve learned that individuals who are born into poverty continue to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"template-text-only.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2388","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2388","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2388"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2388\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2389,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2388\/revisions\/2389"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}