Mes Infos Bébé, the digital parenting coach of the French Red Cross

Mes Infos Bébé (My Baby pieces of information) is a website that supports parents of children from 0 to 3 years old. It provides interactive and diverse content (images, videos, infographics, etc.) realized by early childhood professionals from the RED Cross network, making the early childhood expertise clearer and accessible to all.

Today in France, 40% of parents do not have access to childcare facilities. Apart from the fifteen or so paediatric appointments that punctuate a child’s life between the ages of 0 and 3, these parents do not benefit from any systematic support in their child’s daily life. In September 2020, the French government published the “Report on the first 1000 days”; the support of families in the pre-and post-partum period became a public health issue. The Red Cross wondered how to bring together this Red Cross early childhood know-how and all those parents who are excluded from it. This is how the website Mes Infos Bébé was created.  

Mes Infos Bébé can be defined through two key elements:

1 | The contents are exclusively illustrated and produced by professionals from the Red Cross network. Beyond the seriousness of the information accessible to all, Mes Infos Bébé is also a way to value the work of childhood professionals who meet regularly through workgroups to discuss specific themes. This motivating approach enhances their daily work, promotes inter-professional and inter-regional links and contributes to the feeling of Red Cross unity. Each topic is handled by two or three employees, who meet several times to imagine, in the presence of an illustrator, a playful way of getting a key message across. This is also what being an employee of the Red Cross is all about: getting away from the day-to-day operations and putting one’s expertise at the service of the association’s structuring projects, for the common good. 

2 | From summer 2021, parents can ask their questions directly to professionals of the French Red Cross network, via the chat of Mes Infos Bébé. These professionals are paid a weekly bonus to be reachable for 5 days shifts, during which they answer within 48 hours via chat.

Mes Infos bébé aims to help fathers and mothers overcome the isolation inherent to this challenging phase in life. Initially addressed to the Red Cross internal actors [kindergarten, parenting support centres, employees..], Mes Infos Bébé also aims to be known by other institutional and associative actors who welcome families: regional and municipal structures, maternity wards, and more broadly, the general public. The difficulty of parenting affects all socio-professional categories because being a parent is a mixture of different elements and feelings: patience, love, compromises, concessions and know-how.