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Enriching relationships between children and those who care for them. SDB has been providing ongoing assistance for ICDP to enable the programme to expand in other countries in in addition to Chile, Peru, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Paraguay and the Ukraine.

 

WHAT IS ICDP?

 

History 

ICDP is a competence-building organization that works in the field of psycho-social and educational care of vulnerable children. ICDP represents the work of an international team, founded by the late professor Karsten Hundeide, a developmental psychologist from the University of Oslo. ICDP began developing its training program in 1985 but an organization was not founded until 1992, when it was registered as a private foundation. Its mission is to provide for human care, particularly in conditions when families are uprooted through social changes, migration, war, natural catastrophes, children losing their parents, or having been numbed by severe deprivation and emotional shock; in such situations ability for caring often breaks down and needs to be reactivated. 

 

Recognition

In 1992 the World Health Organization evaluated and then adopted the ICDP program, publishing the ICDP manual in 1993. In Colombia, Guatemala and El Salvador ICDP has close cooperation with UNICEF and the local government. In Norway, ICDP is a national programme supported by the Ministry of Children and Equality. 

 

ICDP approach 

The ICDP approach to training is based on the idea that the best way to help children is by helping the children’s caregivers. The most feasible strategy for helping children on a large scale is to support and educate children’s network of stable caregivers. The first steps is to identify the local child rearing practices that can serve as a basis for further extensions and development, rather than impose concepts and regulations from outside. Help is understood in terms of building up confidence, activating empathic care and supporting the existing child caring-systems within a given community. 

In order to secure sustainability of our work we try, whenever possible, to insert the ICDP Programme into existing institutional structures like government networks, leading NGOs working in the field of care for children and families and educational institutions like high schools and universities. In this way ICDP training may become an established part of the local institutions responsible for the care of children and for the education of future leaders and resource-persons in this field.

The work of ICDP through its emphasis on empathy and compassion for the other, contributes to peace building and our work is linked with promoting children’s rights from the very base of society. 

 

The ICDP programme 

ICDP developed a simple sensitization programme, which has been tested out in different societies all over the world from Indonesia to Latin American, from South Africa to Scandinavian countries and Western-Russia. There is evidence that the programme works in all these different societies and with caregivers from very different educational backgrounds.

The ICDP programme aims to bring out and sustain good quality interaction between caregivers and their children, by raising the awareness of caregivers about their children’s psycho-social needs and by increasing their empathic ability to respond to these needs; it promotes in caregivers a positive conception of their children, so that they can see, identify and ‘feel with their children’, adjusting their caring actions to their children’s initiatives. 

The 8 guidelines for good interaction of the ICDP programme represent criteria taken from psychological research, but these guidelines are used as themes or questions for personal and group reflection and analysis of typical every day interactive episodes between adults and their children. The 8 guidelines thus become topics for self observation and self evaluation, for testing out in practice and then sharing with others personal interactive examples in order to adopt new, more positive ways of relating to children. 

The way se messages of the programme are conveyed is just as important and for that reason ICDP uses 7 Principles of Sensitizing or 7 pedagogic principles designed to have a direct and positive impact on adult-child interactions (relationships) in practice, in everyday life situations. 

The programme is implemented through a series of group meetings and home tasks through which the caregivers’ involvement with their children is enhanced in a positive way, developing competence and confidence in their own capacity to care and thus preventing relationships and conditions that may lead to neglect and abuse of children. 

 

Evaluation

The Bergen university study that in 1992 evaluated the ICDP programme implementation and its influence on parents was recognized by WHO in 1993 which led to the adoption of ICDP by WHO. The evaluation conducted in 2004 by the psychology department of the University of Nariño, Colombia, confirmed the positive influence of ICDP in its effect on improving the relationship between the child and its caregiver, by providing alternatives in cases where there were previously difficulties in the interaction or by increasing the levels and quality of interaction. Evaluations in Angola, Norway, Macedonia and Russia showed similar results. Evaluation studies by university teams are under way in Norway, Sweden, El Salvador and Colombia.

 

Results from studies show:

So called ”reception studies” show that caregivers participating in the ICDP program report very positively about their benefit from participating in the program – using terms like ”provide new meaning and motivation to their experience of being parents”, that the program has ”raised their awareness for the significance of a close relationship to their children”. From different continents, there are similar reports about the positive reception of the program both amongst caregivers, facilitators and politicians who have been involved. 

Some smaller studies have shown consistent improvement in the interaction between caregiver and child (Video-analysis with pre-post and control group designs).

A series of follow-up case studies shows positive changes in the interaction/relationship between caregiver and child and also an improvement in the child’s psychosocial state and health.

Studies about long-term effects of the ICDP intervention have not yet been carried out but there is one such study in process of implementation: The Ministry of children in Norway is currently sponsoring a broad evaluation including a long-term study of impact. This work is carried out by a team that involves ICDP, the University of Oslo and professor Loraine Sherr from London who is leading the study.

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