The CARE Booklet-Intervention (CBI)
The CARE booklet acts as a guide for parents on how to assess and track their child’s developmental progress, and how to provide scaffolding activities to promote their child’s development. However, the strict delivery of any screening tool for parent administration, like CARE, is not sufficient as an intervention. A structured intervention that combined the measurement of children in scenarios like children’s centers for low-income families in Colombia, with remote protocols for registering parent-child interactions at home, was developed and labeled the CARE Booklet Intervention (CBI). The CARE booklet assessing children’s characteristics is a form of home-based records (HBR). An HBR such as CARE, regularly and frequently running in parallel with a full intervention for optimal health and educational systems, is desirable because it can increase parental confidence and engagement in activities with children at home [Also, the CBI could work well at home in cases where interactions with children might be a parental burden. Constant recall and demand for interactions at home might increase parental stress and the possibility of burnout. Recent studies in the prevalence of parental burnout show that cultural and social values like individualism and the number of hours spent paying attention to children play a significant role in many LMICs, including Colombia [In the CBI, the relevance of parental screening it is not a matter of how much children change and develop but a matter of how, when and with whom they interact. The child might develop in ways that was not anticipated by the report and might not perform according to the kind of development they were expected to show. However, before any hypothesis about indulgence and parental stress or engagement [The present study reports findings from a pilot quasi-RCT study of a parent-training intervention program for families in poverty with preschool children: the CARE booklet intervention (CBI). Given the generally promising results of parental interventions in LMICs, it is relevant to evaluate the impact of a remote intervention in a small sample of families living in a Spanish-speaking LMIC. This pilot study could be a starting point for more extensive investigation of prompting, guiding, or scaffolding interventions such as the CBI, scaling this to larger samples of participants (parents and caregivers of toddlers and preschool children). We attempted to answer the following research question for our pilot design: Would the CARE booklet intervention (CBI) with parents from vulnerable and scarcity-conditions neighborhoods in Colombia benefit their children’s cognitive development and language abilities? As a pilot design, it is necessary to note the exploratory conditions for the current study and be cautious in the analysis of the results.