Early Supplementary Feeding, Child Development, and Health Policy

Infant and Young Child Feeding: a Key area to Improve Child Health

  Good nutrition is essential for survival, physical growth, mental development, performance, productivity, health and well-being across the entire life-span: from the earliest stages of fetal development, at birth, and through infancy, childhood, adolescence and on into adulthood. Poor nutrition in the first 1,000 days of children’s lives can have irreversible consequences. For millions of chi...

Foster Care and Early Child Development: Implications for Child Welfare Policy and Practice

Foster children— by virtue of the fact that they are in foster care—must contend with challenges to healthy development that extend beyond the typical challenges presented to infants and children. Foster children have been faced with any of a number of risk factors including poverty, violence, abuse (emotional, physical, sexual) and neglect. Given that they are at greater risk compared to other...

Effectiveness of a supplementary feeding program in child weight gain.

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the effectiveness of a governmental supplementary feeding program in child weight gain. METHODS A cohort study including secondary data on 25,433 low-income children aged between six and 24 months, participating in a fortified milk distribution program known as Projeto Vivaleite, was performed in the state of São Paulo, Southeastern Brazil, between 2003 and 2008. Weight ...

Early Supplementary Feeding and Cognition: Effects over Two Decades

The study reported in this Monograph of the effects of early supplementary feeding on cognition included two data collection periods: a longitudinal investigation spanning the years 1969-1977 and a cross-sectional follow-up carried out in 1988-1989. The study was conducted in four rural villages in Guatemala and compared the differential effects of exposure in childhood (0-7 years) to an Atole ...

Child Health and Development