Women, Infants and Children (WIC)
Integrating Language Nutrition into Messages about Food Nutrition
With a mission of safeguarding the health of low-income women and their young children (up to age 5), the Women, Infants and Children Program – commonly referred to as WIC – provides a vehicle for reaching a critical population of families with children who are at risk of not receiving abundant language nutrition.
- Children in low-income families – like those who are eligible for WIC services – hear an average of 11 million words by age 3, 32 million fewer than their peers in higher income families.
- WIC serves 53 percent of all infants, up to age one, born in the United States,[1] reaching approximately 8.3 million women and children in 2014.
- In 2015, 26 states had more than 100,000 individuals enrolled WIC while the enrollment in 36 states exceeds 50,000.
- Because WIC offices are located in every county in Georgia but managed by a central state office, TWMB was able to quickly and efficiently scale statewide. A similar model can be applied in other states.
WIC Champions Tool Kit
Talk With Me Baby, with leadership provided by the Georgia Department of Public Health, developed a WIC Champions Tool Kit which it used to train the more than 1,000 WIC nutritionists working in the state’s 199 WIC offices. This tool kit prepared the WIC nutritionists to incorporate messages about language nutrition into their interactions with enrolled families. The tool kit and supplementary materials include flipcharts, posters, PowerPoint presentations, and educational and collateral materials that parents can use with children (stickers, bracelets, postcards, flashcards, and prescription pad magnets, etc.).
In addition, WIC offices are showing TWMB’s Baby Ella video on televisions in their waiting rooms to reinforce those messages while families are waiting for their appointments.
Talk With Me Baby WIC Training Materials
- WIC Champions toolkit (coming soon)
- WIC Flipchart for one-on-one nutritional coaching with parents English | Spanish
- PowerPoint presentation (coming soon)
- Letter from Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald, Commissioner of the Georgia Department of Public Health, explaining the importance and benefits of focusing on the WIC nutritionist workforce
- Partners toolkit to introduce local partners like libraries to the language nutrition messages and enable them to reinforce them. (coming soon)
- PDF files for educational and collateral materials
- Mp4 file for language nutrition video developed by DPH (coming soon)
- Mp4 files for “Baby Ella” animated video, explaining the impact of the word gap and TWMB through a graphic narrative. Video is accessible to broad audiences and can be shown in WIC waiting rooms.