Developmental Parenting: A Guide for Early Childhood Practitioners - Softcover

Dr. Roggman is Professor in the Department of Family, Consumer, &Human Development at Emma Eccles Jones College of Education and Human Services, Utah State University. Dr. Roggman's research focuses on parenting and children's early development. She has extensive experience in home visiting research, integrating theory-based inquiry with program evaluation, and training practitioners. She is a strong methodologist with expertise in observational data collection and longitudinal analysis and has authored several observation instruments used extensively by researchers and practitioners. She was principal investigator of a local research team for the national Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project.

Dr. Innocenti is Director of the Research and Evaluation Division at the Center for Persons with Disabilities and Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Emma Eccles Jones College of Education and Human Services, Utah State University. Dr. Innocenti has over 30 years of experience working with infants and young children at-risk and with disabilities and their families in multiple research and model demonstration projects. Using an interdisciplinary model that recognizes the contribution of different disciplines and stakeholders, his research is conducted in and for communities. Recent projects focus on assessment and curriculum, home visiting effectiveness, and preschool intervention to prevent later special education.

Excerpted from Chapter 2 of Developmental Parenting: A Guide for Early Childhood Practioners, by Lori A. Roggman, Ph.D., Lisa K. Boyce, Ph.D., & Mark S. Innocenti, Ph.D.

Copyright © 2008 by Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

What kind of program best facilitates developmental parenting? A developmental parenting program could be set up in several different kinds of ways. Parents could meet with practitioners in their own homes, at a child care center, in a community center, at a school, or in an office building. In many of these settings, parents could meet with practitioners either individually or in groups. Although any of these possibilities could work, we recommend a program in which practitioners meet individually with families in their own homes.

WHY AN IN–HOME PROGRAM?

In–home developmental parenting programs help parents support their children's early development at home and around their community during their everyday lives. Home is where young children, even those in regular child care, spend most of their time with their parents. Parents are usually the most long–term caregivers and teachers that children will ever have. Parents have an enduring relationship with their children, so a program that increases parents' support of their children's development can have a lifelong impact. Also, all families who would benefit from a parenting program, even those with limited transportation, can participate in a developmental parenting program at home.

Regular activities and routines in the home offer easy and, therefore, efficient situations for parents to promote their children's early development and continued learning.Because home–visiting services are delivered to families in their homes, often in kitchens or living rooms, they offer opportunities to support good parenting practices that are already happening and improve the home environment for learning and development. By working with parents in their own homes, practitioners who are knowledgeable about child development and parenting can help parents find ways to use their family's home activities and routines to promote their children's development. By working with one family at a time, practitioners can identify unique opportunities to individualize their program to meet the specific needs and build on the strengths of each child and each family. By working individually with parents and children in their homes, practitioners can tailor the program to parents with children of any age or to families with diverse needs.

Home means more than only a family's living space where they sleep, however. Home also means neighborhoods and communities—wherever parents and children spend time together. Parents spend time with their children in a variety of places—hanging out at home, shopping at the grocery store, going to the park, doing errands at the bank or post office, washing clothes at a laundromat, or going other places. Those are the times and places when parents and children can be building their relationship, exploring the world together, and communicating with each other—sharing the experiences that support early development. By working with parents in the places where they spend time with their children, programs can increase developmental parenting in families' everyday lives.

A disadvantage of in–home services is that families can remain isolated if they do not go to a center where they can interact with other parents and children. Practitioners can feel isolated, too. Providing inhome services can be stressful for practitioners who may work on their own for days at a time visiting individual family homes, often in stressful or chaotic circumstances. It is challenging for supervisors to have practitioners working out in the community away from a central location because they often have infrequent opportunities for supervision and support. The biggest disadvantage of in–home services is that the home visiting approach for delivering services has been questioned in the research literature. Several studies have questioned the efficacy of home visiting to make lasting changes in children's lives.

Research on Home Visiting

Some studies comparing home visiting with other service–delivery strategies or with no service delivery have shown only weak or no effects of home visiting on children's early development. In a 1999 issue of The Future of Children, Deanna Gomby summarized the methods used in several studies questioning the effectiveness of home visiting programs. The primary limitation of these studies is that few of them tested any variations of home visiting within the programs. Therefore, little was learned about how home visiting quality affects the outcomes of programs that use home visiting as their service delivery strategy.

A 2004 meta–analysis, or study of studies, of home visiting by Monica Sweet and Mark Applebaum was more positive about the outcomes of home visiting, reporting overall impacts on children's social and cognitive development and on parents' behaviors and attitudes. Other research shows the importance of variations in the quality of home visits and the responses of families to home visiting. For example, our study of home visiting, published in 2001, investigated variations in the quality of interactions during home visits in an infant– toddler program that aimed to promote positive parent—child interaction. What we learned was that when home visitors were observed effectively engaging parents and involving parents and children together, the families were rated as improving the most. This means that getting parents involved in the home visit and getting them interacting positively with their children at home are important elements for an effective home–visiting program. These strategies were part of that program's overall design and integrated into the specific approaches used by participating home visitors. The effectiveness of these strategies for any particular developmental parenting program depends on how the program is planned, what the practitioners do with each family, and how well the practitioners are trained and supervised.

For many programs, the advantages of home visiting outweigh the disadvantages. It is the quality of the home visiting that becomes critical for the success of the program. What makes high–quality home visiting? High–quality home visiting is described here as facilitative because it facilitates, or paves the way, for positive parent—child interaction and parenting behaviors that support children's early development.

What Is Facilitative Home Visiting?

Facilitative home visiting refers to an individualized approach to service delivery in families' homes that effectively promotes early development by facilitating parents in supporting their own children's development. When practitioners provide guidance, information, and encouragement to parents, it facilitates (or "makes easier") the parents' job of supporting their children's early development. Practitioners effectively facilitate developmental parenting when they help parents focus on parenting, observe their children's behavior, and support their children's development as part of their everyday lives. In turn, good supervision and management help practitioners use effective strategies and resources. Based on information from research, experience, and many conversations with home visitors and their supervisors, we have learned that to do all this effectively, developmental parenting programs require

1. Thoughtful planning
2. Good practices with good tools
3. Ongoing program improvement...