1 – PARENTING –

The Parenting Award: Good Home Visitor Practices During the Pandemic initiative was design from the possibility of recognizing, giving visibility to, and inspiring managers and teams that work directly with the public, close to the most vulnerable families in our country.

Difficulties intensified in the context brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, causing many home visiting programs to be adapted and even temporarily suspended. Meanwhile, the visiting professionals created strategies and adapted safe solutions to continue their work to support families. These adaptations were essential for home visiting programs to move forward despite the pandemic. Thus, this publication aims to register, recognize, and disseminate these adapted practices as part of an ecosystem with a positive impact on child development.

Home visiting programs are organized within the structure of social protection programs or social assistance whose main objective is to support families in care, protection, and activities that stimulate and form bonds for children's healthy and integral development from the time of birth to six years old.

This vital strategy also allows close contact with the reality that families experience and makes identifying vulnerable situations easier. It also allows a connection to the service network, especially in challenging periods like the one we live in when young children and their families are even more exposed to adversity.

In this sense, in periods of crisis, families require greater support to safeguard and promote child development by having their emotional and social needs identified and sharing practices for positive parental interactions. Visits can be a way to respond to these needs for protecting children and are therefore extremely important.

Home-visiting professionals are faced with some challenges in their work, such as families withdrawing from the home visitation program, unsafe conditions for professionals due to the violence in certain territories, difficulty in finding addresses, mothers or caregivers being absent during scheduled visits, among others.

The award recognized professionals who reinvented themselves using technology (WhatsApp groups and phone calls) to improve their methodology in the family approach. Others adopted biosecurity measures and protected themselves to continue making home visits when possible to guarantee the families' safety to the maximum extent.

In this context, Fundação Maria Cecilia Souto Vidigal and the Bernard van Leer Foundation joined forces to hold the “Parenting Award: Good Home Visitor Practices During the Pandemic” initiative to promote the continuity and improvement of these professional family-monitoring practices and form a bank of good practices, extending the reach of these solutions.

We hope that this publication will inspire the strengthening of home visiting programs that focus on attention to families with children in early childhood and promote good practices and active listening to the needs of these professionals and other groups that work with early childhood care and protection policies despite the challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.

We hope that this publication will stir deep reflection for long-term strategies, such as a) the increase of beneficiaries (families and children) and the quality of home visiting programs; b) expansion of courses and qualified training on Child Development; c) investment in more structured programs to support the monitoring and evaluation of child development. The Parenting Award: Good Home Visitor Practices During the Pandemic initiative was conceived from a co-creative process involving the participation of actors in this topic in Brazil. The awards took place between October 2020 and January 2021. The strategic and methodological pioneering nature of the process allowed for the target audience's optimal assimilation, resulting in 415 entries from all of the country's regions. The 100 awarded practices were determined from a two-phase evaluation of the initiatives, the final phase conducted by a group of specialists in the area.

This publication will present these 100 practices, highlighting 10 of them for “Inspirational Practices” and the other 90 awarded practices categorized in the “What the visits in the pandemic told us” section.

Enjoy the read!