Reminders for readiness: E-communication to support parents in promoting early childhood development

With Reminder for Readiness (R4R), we address the challenge of racial and ethnic gaps in accessing critical information about young children’s health and development by developing, piloting, and studying a culturally relevant, acceptable text messaging system for parents of infants and toddlers. In partnership with community-based organizations in Minneapolis serving the Somali community, we will develop culturally appropriate, desired messages; form the infrastructure for effective parent recruitment; and analyze the implementation of the partnerships, text messaging system and initial impact of the messages. We hypothesize that infants and toddlers of parents receiving the text messages will have improved well-child visits, immunizations, screening, and service venue use. Embedding messages about appropriate service use in a more general stream of useful, culturally responsive content will help generate high levels of engagement in child development, and partnerships between the University of Minnesota and communities and stakeholders will improve the effectiveness of the platform and the messaging.