Given the discussions about this program’s merits and scientific relevance, I think I’d like to recapitulate what it actually does (source):
- It consists of a visiting programme where vulnerable families receive one visit, lasting about one hour (45 minutes in BBC’s example), every week, fortnight or month.
- These visits may be offered to families with children under three years old, in special cases to be extended to six.
- The programme is to be implemented by the municipalities - it is, however, voluntary for them.
- The federal government reimburses municipalities with R$65 ($17) per child in the programme. (This will not cover costs of using municipal employees.)
- The programme (the visits) is supposed to be executed by non-employees of the municipalities - volunteers or third sector parties.
- Visitors will be given one week of training before they start.
- As of last year, the programme was active in about 6% of Brazilian cities. The ministry’s page about the programme hasn’t been updated for a very long time, so presumably it hasn’t expanded greatly since then. (Does anyone have updated numbers?)
This is actually, as it happens, definitely not “The world’s most ambitious parenting program”.
It reminds me a lot of what the British charity Home Start is doing. The idea of weekly (or less-frequent) visits to vulnerable families is definitely not bad, but Home Start’s experiences are less - exhilarating - that what these videos seem to imply. Also, since the program is practically devoid of funding, there’s not really money to have professionals travel far and walk five hours in the sun to get to the remotest corner.
The idea is, in other words, not bad in and of itself - but just as Home Start in the UK never actually brought any family out of poverty (even if they did help many through hard times), a weekly visit is also unlikely to achieve that goal in Brazil. Just as in the UK, such visits are also not a valid replacement for actual services.
I.e., the hype of these videos are very far from the actual reality.
