Young Child Attachment Project, St. Petersburg
Location: St.Petersburg, Russia
Duration: 12 months
This two-year project in partnership with the St Petersburg Early Intervention Institute, funded mainly by the European Union, ended in 2008. The main aim was to build the Institute's knowledge and understanding of children's needs for development and a Russian evidence base of research findings on what works best for child development, to be disseminated throughout Russia. Russian child care specialists and those who make decisions about placement of babies and children can now obtain guidance and information from the Institute.
The project also made a training film entitled "Early Relationships and Child Development" launched and distributed at the project's final conference in Moscow, and a book of the same name launched at the British Embassy and the British Consulate General in St Petersburg. The film was made from material left over from making of "The Road Home" by the Institute, EveryChild and HealthProm, and aims to train all involved in care of small children to work out from their own observations what children too young to express themselves feel and need. The National Fund for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children contributed half the costs of the book and circulated it widely. The book sets out the psychosocial factors necessary for the healthy development of babies and children to the age of three.
The Institute's specialists chose
a programme to adapt to Russia, Mellow Parenting, developed for
supporting 'hard-to-reach' mothers in Glasgow to care for and
relate with their babies and small children. After training in
this programme, the Korchak Centre in St Petersburg and the Novgorod
Children's Centre each ran two 14-week groups for mothers and
babies or toddlers. Korchak Centre mothers had themselves grown
up in institutions.
Mellow Parenting had been thoroughly
evaluated in Britain and its lead child psychologist ensured that
evaluation in Russia was also rigorous. As well as using a number
of assessment scales, the project relied crucially on video recordings
of mother-child interaction at home during feeding. Recordings
were evaluated by trained raters who did not know whether they
were viewing a recording of a mother and child in the intervention
group or a matched control group.
To reach larger numbers of vulnerable
parents whose small children are at risk of being given up to
institutions, the project also trained health and social care
practitioners from the local authority services with which the
Korchak and Novgorod Children's Centres work most closely.
The Institute has received requests for training in early intervention. The film has been widely used for training by NGOs and university departments.
