Pediatric dentistry encompasses crucial components aimed at promoting optimal oral health in children. This article highlights the essential elements of pediatric dentistry, including preventive care, behavior management, growth and development monitoring,comprehensive dental treatments, and specialized materials and methods. By emphasizing preventive measures, creating supportive environments, and addressing the unique needs of pediatric patients, pediatric dentists play a pivotal role in nurturing healthy smiles from an early age. The integration of these components underscores the commitment to providing compassionate, tailored, and effective oral health care for children, ultimately contributing to the long-term oral health and well-being of pediatric patients.
This paper presents a community case study of how the Moments That Matter ® (MTM) Program community-led monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) system contributes to a scalable model with quality and sustainable impact. With a faith-based approach, MTM is an early childhood development program partnership of Episcopal Relief & Development which is rooted in parenting empowerment and community ownership. MTM empowers Primary Caregivers, strengthening nurturing care of some 60,000 children aged under three since 2012. Launched in Zambia, MTM has expanded to five other countries. Based on MTM Zambia and Kenya, this paper examines how an innovative, community-led MEL system functions to drive sustainable impacts and scaling. Measurement for change has been critical to the community MEL system. MTM is people-centered with community leaders, early childhood development service providers, volunteers and Primary Caregivers all setting their specific goals. The program is inclusive with all stakeholders engaged in monitoring and making adjustments; interactive with relationship-based social and behavior change strategies; informative with continuous data gathering used for decisions and problem-solving; and dynamic with built-in flexibility and an adaptation process. The community-led MEL propels scaling up through two channels: (1) New communities for MTM program start up: As MTM communities graduate to community ownership, program staff and budget are then invested in new marginalized and underserved rural areas. (2) Deepening reach within MTM communities: Over the first two cycles, communities transition to community ownership, then continue independently of staff and budget. They identify a new set of vulnerable Primary Caregivers of children under three and carry out the caregiver parenting support and learning activities. The success of the program’s community-led MEL in achieving sustainable change and fueling the program scale up hinges on three factors: (1) Initiating the community-led MEL dimension at project start, gradually increasing the community role while reducing the staff role. (2) Provision of Community MEL capacity-building and effective, user-friendly tools to be tailored locally. (3) Three program stakeholder types leading MEL and collaborating closely with each other: ECD Committees with MTM-trained faith leaders, ECD Promoters, and Primary Caregivers of children under three.
Background: Promoting high-quality early childhood development (ECD) is vital for individuals’ physical and social well-being and yields significant societal returns. However, children in marginalised regions like Kenya’s arid and semi-arid lands (ASALs) face significant barriers to accessing quality ECD services. Aim: This study aimed to document existing ECD services in Kenya’s ASAL areas, including their availability, types and key characteristics; identify gaps in their provision and propose solutions to enhance access and quality. Setting: This qualitative study was conducted in 10 ASAL counties in Kenya. Methods: Using purposive and snowball sampling techniques, 103 key informants, including pre-primary teachers, parents, healthcare workers, religious leaders and county ECD coordinators, were interviewed. The interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim and analysed thematically. Results: The study found that while diverse ECD programmes exist in ASAL regions, their quality and effectiveness are hindered by challenges such as inadequate funding, insecurity, extreme weather events, food insecurity, poor infrastructure, inadequate healthcare access and limited early learning opportunities. Recommendations include increasing ECD funding, improving healthcare, enhancing early learning opportunities, promoting livelihood diversification and addressing security and food insecurity. Conclusion: Despite investments in ECD programmes, significant challenges persist, underscoring the need to provide children with high-quality services that foster nurturing care and mitigate risks to their development. This study highlights the urgency of adopting a multi-sectoral approach to strengthen ECD programmes and services in Kenya’s ASAL. Contribution: This article contributes to the scarce literature on ECD programming in Kenya’s ASALs by documenting existing ECD services, identifying critical gaps in their provision and offering actionable recommendations to address barriers to programme quality and effectiveness.
Phyllis M. Magoma, Amina A Abubakar, Martha Kaniala et al.
This study examined factors and teacher practices that foster compassion in Ghanaian kindergarten classrooms. Situated within the sociocultural theory, the study sought to understand how compassion is enacted and nurtured by teachers in early childhood education settings. Data were collected from eight public Kindergarten teachers in the Cape Coast Metropolis through semi- structured interviews, allowing for in-depth exploration of teachers‘ perspectives and classroom practices. The data were analysed thematically to identify recurring patterns. The findings revealed that compassion is socio culturally entrenched and shaped by broader societal values, norms and religious teachings that emphasise care, reciprocity and love. Teachers drew on these cultural and moral elements to cultivate compassionate disposition among young children. Pedagogical strategies such as storytelling, guided peer interactions, role modelling and the creation of learning centres within the kindergarten classroom also emerged as key teacher practices for fostering compassionate behaviour. In addition, teachers organised community visits that allowed children to observe and experience compassion in action in real-life situations, while parental involvement and support further reinforced children’ s learning and behaviour beyond the classroom environment, highlighting the interconnected roles of school, home and community. Together, these findings call for the need for policy and pedagogical shifts that embed compassion within teacher education, curriculum design, and school culture. Such integration would ensure that compassion becomes a lived educational outcome rather than a peripheral moral and social outcome.
I've increasingly felt that the correct answer to the question "Is depression nature or nurture?" is "yes."In a landmark study in this issue, Kendler and colleagues (1) put substance to this answer.While the answer may still be "yes," through the use of a cleverly designed natural experiment, Kendler et al. have identified a portion of nurture, the rearing environment, that can clearly be defined and even altered with intervention.In brief, they studied 666 high-risk full siblings, with high risk defined as having at least one parent with major depression, and 2,595 high-risk half siblings of which at least one was home-reared and one adopted away.What made this study possible were the large samples from a national registry in Sweden, the parental assessments, and the fact that in Sweden, where adoption is not common, adoptive families are selected to provide high-quality rearing environments, including high educational status, economic security, and a stable environment.It is impressive that this study comes from an investigator group that has done major genetic and twin studies.In both types of studies, the nature of the environment is unclear.Similarly, the adoption studies, another way of studying environmental effects, usually have had insufficient information on the biological parents and their clinical state.As the authors point out, biological parents of adoptees likely have a higher risk of psychopathology, less education, and higher divorce rates.Moreover, the environment in the adopted-away home has not been clearly defined in most studies.In fact, the authors previously carried out an extended adoption study in the same sample and had shown statistically that genetic factors and rearing experiences contributed to an approximately equal extent (2).Both forms of cross-generational transmission act additively on the risk for depression in the offspring.However, the contribution of the rearing environment was only shown statistically.These challenges in this and other previous reports must have led the authors to this study design.The findings confirmed the strong protective effect of a nurturing rearing environment on the child's well-being.However, this protective effect disappeared when an adoptive parent had major depression or the nurturing adoptive home was disrupted by parental death or divorce during the adoptee's childhood or adolescence.The results demonstrate the strong impact of the rearing environment on risk for major depression and support the importance of intervention efforts to improve the rearing environment in highrisk families.
Ongoing engagement with society and having a supportive environment are important protective factors for our mental wellbeing. Through meaningful engagement with children, seniors feel valued, empowered, and have a renewed sense of purpose. This is a health-romoting measure in enhancing and maintaining senior’s functional abilities and wellbeing. To support an ongoing engagement, National Trades Union Congress (NTUC) Health’s Silver Circle Senior Care Centre (SCC) and a co-located childcare (My First Skool) in Singapore jointly developed and piloted an intergenerational (IG) collaboration programme. This paper describes the development, interventions and lessons learned from a senior care perspective.
Cheryl Ching Ling Lim, Caymania Lay Teng Low, Soo Boon Hia et al.
“Relationships as a form of energy exchange” is a concept used by Howard Glasser’s Nurtured Heart Approach to explain the relationship dynamics between children and their adult care givers. This energy exchange can sometimes lead to challenging behaviors in a child when their energy is too intense for the child to regulate independently, or for the parents to moderate through traditional parenting approaches. The concept of relationships as an energy exchange is written about by Howard Glasser in regards to the Nurtured Heart Approach, a parent training and behavioral modification program used to treat children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Brenner, Hektner, Brotherson and Hansen (2016) challenged the concept of relationships as an energy exchange as an unproven theory in a comparative study of theories used to garner evidence for NHA. In particular, the inability to substantiate the theory was made in application of the discipline of Human Behavior Theory. This paper lays out evidence for relationships as an energy exchange by looking beyond human behavior theory and into social and physical sciences for support of Glasser’s important concept. This article looks at the areas of mirror neurons, attachment theory, neuropsychology, social baseline theory, neurobiology, and neurosociology for support. This literature review looks at studies, articles, and books that demonstrate how it is possible to claim relationships as an energy transaction how this concept can be used successfully to moderate and redirect the problematic behaviors of “intense” children.
OBJECTIVES: In 2019, >71 million children aged <5 had spent their entire lives in conflict-affected settings. Compounding adversities including violence, poverty, and displacement have immediate and long-term effects on early childhood development, health, behavior, and well-being. In response, adaptations of Reach Up have been implemented in conflict and crisis settings. METHODS: This article uses exploratory multiple case study methodology, drawing from implementation and qualitative data from 3 interventions: a mobile phone-based intervention promoting nurturing care among Rohingya and crisis-affected host communities in Bangladesh; Reach Up amid acute violence and displacement in Northeast Syria; and Reach Up group sessions and home visits integrated with health services for an indigenous population in Venezuela. RESULTS: In Bangladesh, tailoring interactive voice response messages improved responsiveness to the developmental needs of young children, yet complementary in-person services were identified as a key program enhancement. In Syria, rapid adaptations of Reach Up addressed the needs of families in acute crisis, including social-emotional learning games for school-aged children. In Venezuela, Reach Up, coupled with complementary lactation counseling, yielded high rates of uptake and satisfaction, and children's language development was highlighted as a key area of growth. CONCLUSIONS: Recommendations to promote early childhood development in crisis and conflict settings include: (1) cultural adaptation based on a holistic understanding of children and caregivers' needs; (2) the integration of child and family safety and linkages with complementary services on the basis of community needs and priorities, and (3) the importance of designing for scale through blended models and costing analyses.
Katelin Wilton, Katie Maeve Murphy, Ahsan Mahmud et al.
The weeks following birth are a critical period for a woman and her infant, setting the stage for long-term health and well-being. To optimize the health of women and infants, postpartum care should become an ongoing process, rather than a single encounter, with services and support tailored to each woman's individual needs. It is recommended that all women have contact with their obstetrician-gynecologists or other obstetric care providers within the first 3 weeks postpartum. This initial assessment should be followed up with ongoing care as needed, concluding with a comprehensive postpartum visit no later than 12 weeks after birth. The comprehensive postpartum visit should include a full assessment of physical, social, and psychological well-being, including the following domains: mood and emotional well-being; infant care and feeding; sexuality, contraception, and birth spacing; sleep and fatigue; physical recovery from birth; chronic disease management; and health maintenance. Women with chronic medical conditions such as hypertensive disorders, obesity, diabetes, thyroid disorders, renal disease, and mood disorders should be counseled regarding the importance of timely follow-up with their obstetrician-gynecologists or primary care providers for ongoing coordination of care. During the postpartum period, the woman and her obstetrician-gynecologist or other obstetric care provider should identify the health care provider who will assume primary responsibility for her ongoing care in her primary medical home. Optimizing care and support for postpartum families will require policy changes. Changes in the scope of postpartum care should be facilitated by reimbursement policies that support postpartum care as an ongoing process, rather than an isolated visit. Obstetrician-gynecologists and other obstetric care providers should be in the forefront of policy efforts to enable all women to recover from birth and nurture their infants. This Committee Opinion has been revised to reinforce the importance of the "fourth trimester" and to propose a new paradigm for postpartum care.
This study aims—by adopting the inductive and deductive methodologies—to study the features of the Prophetic method in building and nurturing the creative personality among youth, in light of authentic evidence from the Prophetic tradition. The research seeks to answer the following questions: How does the Prophetic tradition consider the creative character? What are the features of the Prophet's approach in building the creative character on both psychological and intellectual levels? FHow did the features of the Prophet's approach also manifest in nurturing the creative character? The importance of the study lies in its contribution to examining the reality of creativity in the Islamic nation and using those features as a standard to gauge the nation's proximity or distance from the correct foundational principles for developing creative individuals in various aspects of life. The research also aims to outline the Prophet’s methodology in building and nurturing the creative personality, to serve as a roadmap for the Islamic nation in the creative development of its members. This will help them understand their reality, meet their desires and needs, ensure proper care befitting creatives, and alert wise leaders and decision-makers to gaps and weaknesses that need to be addressed and corrected in the Islamic creative endeavor. The study, through the results it has reached, has observed various aspects of Prophetic care for the issue of creativity through the applications of the noble Prophetic guidance in the psychological and intellectual development of the creative individual, and in creating a nurturing system for the creative personality that ensures the integrity of the development, its protection, monitoring, and proper guidance.
