ABSTRACT
Ongoing cultural and economic changes are inducing world-wide modifications in families’ functioning and in children’s upbringing in all social strata (CEPAL, 1998). In most developing countries (and even in the lower strata of many developed countries), the precarious life conditions endured by a large proportion of the population endanger their children’s development. A critical analysis of Latin American data, taken as a case study, shows that early childhood policies are being proposed, both by governments and by multilateral agencies such as the World Bank, as means of social intervention to overcome inequality in the developing/majority countries. They often recommend various informal programmes of daily assistance, to be implemented by poor uneducated mothers, in their own precarious homes, with little or no payment and scarce if any training or supervision. Those practices of assisting those in need, by dealing poorly with poverty, differ widely from the early childhood educational proposals for quality, stated in the documents published by the European Commission Network on Childcare and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
