Objective To assess the effectiveness of an integrated early child development intervention, combining stimulation and micronutrient supplementation and delivered on a large scale in Colombia, for children's development, growth, and hemoglobin levels.

No abstract

Emerging pragmatic language skills involve social, cognitive and linguistic abilities, including children's awareness of the conversational partner's mental states. The present study investigated the relation between children's theory of mind (ToM) and features of pragmatic language skills assessed through narrative discourse. One hundred and fifteen Spanish-speaking children attending preschool and first grade (57 girls, 58 boys) participated. Children completed a standardized measure of receptive language, narrated a wordless picture book and completed first-and second-order ToM tasks. ToM was significantly related to various pragmatic language features. Hierarchical regression analyses showed that second-order ToM scores were a significant predictor of pragmatic language skills. Findings suggest that children's communicative competence in social contexts, to some extent, requires the development of higher-order social-cognitive reasoning.

Building capacity within health and education systems of low- and middle-income countries in order to deliver high-quality early childhood services requires coordinated efforts across sectors, effective governance, sufficient funding, an adequate workforce, reliable data systems, and continuous monitoring, evaluation, and improvement cycles; it also requires partnerships with the private sector, communities, and parents. In addition, building capacity requires leadership, innovation of strategies to fit into existing structures, evidence-based intervention models, and effective partnerships that help make interventions more culturally relevant, help finance them, and help create institutional long-term support and sustainability for them. In this article, we focus on identifying eight critical aspects of enabling systemic support for early childhood services. Every action that strengthens these critical aspects should be seen as necessary, but insufficient, steps toward a national strong governance structure for delivering a locally relevant and comprehensive early child development program that promotes children's developmental potentials.

No abstract