C OvER sTORY
“
Everyone loves clean apples. I will wash my hands before
I have sweets!” giggled Rao Yue, a toddler coming up to her
third birthday, in a village in Huachi county, Gansu Province
in China’s underdeveloped northwest, on June 14. Rao’s mother gave
her sweets and words of praise for learning the lesson of “cleanliness”
from the story she had just been told.
For Chinese – or Western – middle-class parents living in cities, this
kind of interaction is normal. Research has repeatedly shown talking,
playing, and reading with kids is vital to their emotional and cognitive
development. But poorer parents are less likely to interact with their
children – not out of a lack of love, but out of heavier time commit-
ments, greater stress, and most of all, without the access to knowl-
edge of feeding and parenting. Their expectations for children are as
high as those of their urban peers, but rural children are much more
likely to have cognitive problems, language issues, or stunted social
and economic development. In a tough society, they may be losing at
the starting line. That casts a shadow not only over their future, but
also over China’s ambitions of escaping the “middle-income trap” that
catches so many nations.
Rao is taking part in one of a series of pilot programmes thatBaby Development
losing out early
Babies and toddlers in China’s poor rural areas are badly in need of early intervention
programmes. But can such schemes deliver on the national level?
By Li Jia
Children and their parents play together at a village parenting centre
established by REAP in Shaanxi ProvincePhoto by VCG