Home visitation programs have been around for hundreds of years. As with most strategies, the popularity of such programs has ebbed and flowed over time. This is a time of significant emphasis on home visiting as a strategy to support very young children and their families through one-on-one strength-based work. The need for progressive, interactive, learning and practice is clear. In order to support continuous learning and best practice work, we must look to the programs, and to the workers themselves, for guidance regarding what they need and when they need it. As a result of providing such support, home visitors will learn and work in conditions under which they personally feel most successful. With workers providing their best, we can then more effectively begin to measure and evaluate programs and their effectiveness with children and families.
For the next few blogs, I will post material out of my book “Babies Can’t Wait: Relationship-based Home Visiting”. The purpose of my book (and these posts) is to provide programs and staff with practical, concrete information based on best practices in the field of home visitation. The tips are designed to incorporate current research and experiential discoveries into easy to follow, down-to-earth guidebooks. Actual home visiting stories are noted to make the tips “real” to workers.
This comes from years of creating and implementing continuous learning programs for home visitors. The key concept that came out of my work was that home visitors and their supervisors wanted practical, concrete “steps to take” that they could incorporate into next week’s visits. Programs clearly understood the need to make their workers comfortable in the early stages of their jobs by giving them tips and techniques that they could immediately use. This does not discount the need for training workers on theory and on dealing with difficult issues; it does however, speak to prioritizing training based on the interests, needs and concerns of programs and their staff.
Over the years, I have continued working and training in the field of home visitation services. After being a parent in Head Start (and in fact because of Head Start), I returned to college, earning a B.A. in Early Childhood Development and an M.A. in Human Development. I have been a home visitor, coordinator, supervisor, director and trainer. I have taken advantage of whatever home visitation training was available. And I have created and implemented trainings, curricula and models. As a result, I believe that the full potential of home visitation programs for children and families has not yet been realized. However, I believe we can say that there are certain best practices that are more successful than others in working with parents and children in their own homes. The 25 tips I will talk about on this blog are designed as practical, concrete tips that you can put into place as you begin home visiting. They are based on generally considered best practices in the field, translated into my practical, concrete applications. I hope you learn from them, and enjoy putting them into practice.
I hope (and believe!) that this approach will be helpful to you as you begin home visiting – whether this is your first year, or your 15th year. I strongly believe that, if you have the tools and the confidence, you will continue to grow and practice over time.
Warmly, Linda Kimura, the Babies Can’t Wait Lady
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