Since ASHIRVAD, an Initiative for Child Development and Integrated Living started its activities with the Child Development Centre in 1983 at Chennai, its focus has been to create an interface between parents and professionals.
The recent publication above, is a handbook to help professionals in child development and rehabilitation to focus on neuro-developmental monitoring in early childhood, by enabling parents to be active participants in the process. It is a compilation of experience of forty years in child development, where parenting of developmentally challenged children and professional involvement in rehabilitation evolved as a joint model.
This is one of the five books conceived in 2023 in connection with the 40th anniversary of ASHIRVAD. The three books published earlier were:
The book, Bud to Blossom is a parental guide to observe child's growth and development from birth to five years.
The book, Accompany your child, is a guide to parents to monitor a developmentally challenged child in the pre-school years.
The book, Parenting Presence elaborates on how parents can be formative in their approach while being involved with their children in early childhood.
The fifth book in this series which would be hopefully published this year, is Engage Your Child, which discusses play based learning support for children in their early childhood, which parents can pursue at home.
I feel encouraged by having been able to pursue to create an interface between parents and professionals, during our involvement in the developmental Paediatric Units at CMC Vellore, PIMS, Pondicherry and MOSC, Kolenchery.
The three observations which have evolved ding this forty years are:
Parents need awareness and enablement to be involved in the formative development of children in early childhood.
The home needs a setting to allow the experiences of childhood to become foundational for child development and personal formation.
The professionals engaged in promoting child development and rehabilitation, need support to create an interface between parents and professionals.
Anna and I send the above bunch of rain Lily flowers from our garden to professionals with whom we were able to work at Chennai, Vellore, Pondicherry and Kolenchery. They contributed to evolve this model of promoting child development by fostering the interface between parents and children. The support from the Bangalore Baptist Hospital helped in holding a weekly forum for professionals in child development and rehabilitation for five years starting from 2019, which anchored this approach to evolve !
The on line parenting forum that I am part of, continues to give me thoughts that need attention for supporting parents, to make home a fostering environment for children to flourish during their early childhood.
So the journey to explore to expand the interface between parents and professionals for childhood development and rehabilitation continues....!
M.C.Mathew (text and photo)
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