DURING a visit to a young mother’s home in rural Shaanxi province in north-western China, Qin Shuhui, a family-planning worker, sets out a row of plastic cups on a bare concrete floor. They are playthings for the woman’s only child, a 27-month-old girl. Addressing the toddler by her nickname, Yingying, Ms Qin patiently tries to coax her to toss rings around the cups. When Yingying instead walks over and places a ring next to one, Ms Qin smiles and chirps “well done”. Turning to the mother, she says: “You should applaud no matter what. It doesn’t matter if she fails to toss it around the cup.”

It is an unusually warm and fuzzy scene given the harsh reputation of Ms Qin’s employers. She is a member of a 1m-strong army of family-planning officials whose mission is to enforce China’s one-child policy. They make sure that mothers are sterilised or are fitted with intrauterine devices (IUDs), or that fathers are given vasectomies, after they have had their last legally allowed child (many parents can have a second one if they meet certain conditions). Ms Qin used to perform such duty when she first met Yingying’s mother and prodded her about reproductive plans. Now she is assuming a gentler persona, as a parenting instructor.

Ms Qin is part of a small pilot programme that began in November, involving just 69 workers in the prefecture of Shangluo. It is aimed at changing the way that employees of the National Health and Family Planning Commission do their work. The idea is to convert enforcers into childhood-development counsellors. The government will examine whether Shangluo’s experiment might serve as a model for the rest of the country.

A senior official at the commission’s headquarters in Beijing, Cai Jianhua, is overseeing the project with help from researchers from Stanford University’s Rural Education Action Programme. Mr Cai agrees with the Americans’ view that parents need to be educated in child-raising techniques. Family-planning workers, who are available in every township, might help with this, Mr Cai believes.

Changing officials’ habits could prove hard. For 35 years the enforcers have been evaluated ruthlessly by their superiors for their fulfilment of quantifiable targets, such as achieving a certain number of sterilisations and, most importantly, ensuring that no parents exceed their quota of offspring. The enormous fines they impose on violators, and their occasional use of force to make women abort their fetuses, have stained China’s reputation globally. “This is much better. I’m welcome at the children’s homes,” Ms Qin says. “In the past they would hide from me.”

Adjustments to the one-child policy are making reform a bit easier. Declining birth rates are reducing pressure to meet population targets. In 2013 the government relaxed conditions for having a second child. Demographers generally agree that China should be, if anything, encouraging more births to avoid a precipitous decline in the working-age population. Public pressure is also playing a big role in prompting the government to rethink its approach. In June 2012 photos of a forced late-term abortion, and the subsequent delivery of a dead girl, went viral online, causing a national uproar; some family-planning officials were sacked or reassigned, and the woman received an apology.

That case happened to occur in Shaanxi, not very far from where Ms Qin works. She and her colleagues say they have since had to tread much more carefully in their dealings with the public. “In the past, if you saw a pregnant woman in the village, you’d ask her to come by for an abortion,” Ms Qin says. “Now there’s nothing you can do.”

The internet has also helped to expose abuses in the city of Linyi, in coastal Shandong province. Officials there were suspended, pending an investigation, after video circulated online of a family being illegally detained in November to force payment of a family-planning fine. A ten-month-old baby was among those confined. Linyi is notorious for the brutal behaviour of family-planning workers. It was brought to light by Chen Guangcheng, a blind activist. In 2012 he dramatically escaped his own illegal confinement and made it to America—an episode that drew worldwide attention to China’s family-planning thuggery.

Changing public perceptions could be hard. Ms Qin avoided mentioning her official title when she first entered homes to counsel parents. But she thinks the roles of workers like her could be transformed within four or five years. “Maybe it’ll be only about parenting,” she muses.