How Bijie City in southwest China invests in rural children's development(2)

Home visits aside, the program also offers other services. The Dayin Town Early Child Development Center, where the parenting coaches also work, provide parent-child group activities, including story-reading, games and musical events, all based on the physical and mental development patterns and learning characteristics of infants and toddlers, with a strong emphasis on caregiver-child interaction. The center is open from Sunday to Thursday.

"Their mother and I bring them here three to four times a week," the grandmother of a boy and a girl told Beijing Review. According to her, the activities at the center bring joy and fun to the children.

The program also provides nutrition packages to local children, bringing the rate of nutritional-deficiency anemia in Dayin down from 24 percent in 2017 to 13 percent in 2022, Wang Limei, chief supervisor of the program in Dayin, told Beijing Review. 

But children aren't the only ones benefiting from the project's wide-ranging undertakings. Notably, the program is also creating job opportunities for local women.

In Dayin, for example, the coaches and program supervisors can respectively earn 1,800 ($252) to 3,000 yuan ($420) per month, a respectable income from the local viewpoint.

Fang Jin, Vice Chairman and Secretary General of the CDRF, said at a symposium in Beijing on December 16, 2023, that more than 1,300 parenting coaches and program supervisors are currently involved in the program.

According to the CDRF, the program was evaluated by a research team led by Professor James Heckman, a Nobel laureate in economics, and the results were encouraging. Their study found that the trial in Gansu's Huachi had a significant impact, as 84 percent of the children who received home visits from parenting coaches outperformed the control group in cognitive, socioemotional and language domains. When compared to similar programs in the United States, Ireland and Jamaica, the program was found to be similarly effective at a much lower cost (only 3-5 percent of the U.S. program). 

During the Beijing symposium, the CDRF launched the Home Visiting Action Plan for 100,000 Rural Infants and Toddlers (2023-25), an extension of the China REACH program, which aims to provide early childhood parenting services to a broader range of rural children under the age of 3.

No effort should be spared to bring rural infants and toddlers up to the same developmental level as their urban counterparts, the plan read.