If physiological and psychological needs are not met at the corresponding stage, it becomes increasingly difficult to repair the damage and achieve compensatory growth. For this reason, the health of the child determines the health of the adult, and the growth and development of one generation affect the next.
The child’s needs, both biological and psychosocial, have a specific time or stage at which they must be satisfied. The loss of that opportunity, often unique, causes deficits that become evident in later stages. At the biological level, growth impairment in height caused by malnutrition requires a long time for recovery, and normal values are often never reached. At the psychosocial level, the loss of opportunities to acquire lived experience may sometimes never be recovered.
It has been repeatedly pointed out how malnutrition and lack of stimulation act synergistically during the early years. This influences school performance, adolescence and even adult life.
The role of the family acquires particular relevance in this context because it is the first and immediate component of the child’s surrounding environment. Certainly, the mother occupies an especially prominent position, while the family acts as a placenta, excluding some influences, modifying others and adding some of its own.
The nuclear family is part of another larger family, and this, in turn, is part of a community that lives in a specific place in the world and in a defined sociohistorical period. Therefore, the influences of the environment, which the family transmits, are in constant evolution. Neither the environment nor the child is static. This is what makes the study of human growth and development, its relationships, dynamics and reciprocal interaction, so essential and so promising.
From the above, it follows that healthcare for mothers and children does not consist of providing a service according to the age and sex of the population. What is required, fundamentally, is an integrated type of care that encompasses the processes of growth and development and human reproduction, which are the foundation of life itself.
The nature of these processes is of crucial importance for understanding the states of health and disease of the mother and child. Seen from this perspective, maternal and child healthcare and primary care constitute the two terms of an equation.
Care for mothers and children contributes normative experiences as well as a philosophy of action, while primary care encompasses this conception and extends it to other age groups and other pathologies. In addition, primary care makes it possible for maternal and child programs to be articulated with those of other groups, without losing their own characteristics, so that resources that until now belonged to sealed compartments may be used jointly, including not only those of the health sector but also other extrasectoral contributions.
As an integral part of the process of social development, primary healthcare transcends the health sector itself and acts by energizing those responsible for the actions that make it possible to achieve levels of well-being, expressed in terms of health, nutrition, housing, education, production, employment, family income and consumption, both for the individual and for the community.
The quality of life of a large part of the population of Latin America depends on the creative capacity of those directly responsible for launching this integrative mechanism and for keeping it functioning under optimal conditions.
In recent years, the dynamics of health problems have undergone a notable acceleration as a result of the changes taking place in the sociopolitical context of the Region. Until approximately five decades ago, a latency period was required before the transformations taking place were manifested in biological facts. In recent years, a process has emerged in which the changes introduced have a rapid impact on the health of the population.
According to demographic characteristics and the level of economic and social development, the countries of the Region show a wide range of expressions that are objectively manifested in the health levels achieved. However, despite this kaleidoscope, the countries have similar problems, although not simultaneous ones, which must be analyzed together for their subsequent solution.
It could be said that countries are at different moments in their evolutionary process, which is expressed not only in economic and social changes, but also in educational mechanisms, in the dissemination of knowledge and in access to the new technologies that must be implemented in response to the new problems that arise.
Studies on critical poverty carried out by ECLAC, based on surveys and censuses conducted around 1979, considered families to be indigent when, even if they spent all their income on food, they could not satisfy their nutritional needs. Families were classified as poor when, given their income and the percentage of it allocated to food, they could not satisfy those needs.
Based on the information collected, it was estimated that 19% of the Latin American population lived in conditions of indigence and 40% in conditions of poverty. In absolute values, this means that there were 54 million indigent people and 113 million poor people.
These regional averages conceal major inequalities among countries regarding the extent of poverty. Thus, the share of the population living in poverty in 1979 was below 10% in Argentina; between 10% and 15% in Costa Rica, Chile and Venezuela; between 25% and 40% in Mexico; between 40% and 55% in Brazil, Colombia and Peru; and above 55% in Honduras.
The studies covered 84% of the Latin American population, and the data practically overlap with the health levels achieved by the countries.
