Don't miss ZERO TO THREE's July 2010 issue about home visiting!
Journal of ZERO TO THREE: National Center for Infants, Toddlers, and Families
July's Topic: Home Visiting: Past, Present, and Future
Michigan authors - Nichole Paradis and Carla Barron write about ethics and infant mental health home visiting. Debbie Weatherston presents parents' responses to infant mental health home visiting services.
Home Visiting: Looking Back and Moving Forward - Kimberly Boller, Debra A. Strong, and Deborah Daro
Recent large federal investments in services for pregnant women and young children will fuel the expansion of home visiting services across the U.S. The authors summarize the history of home visiting and describe trends toward evidence-based and national program models. Moving to an integrated system requires supports for implementation with fidelity to
the home visiting model, along with scale up and sustainability of services. Lessons from recent initiatives highlight the factors likely to affect states’ efforts to expand and integrate home visiting services in the coming years.
Supporting Parents and Children Where They Live: Improving Federal and State Policy for Home Visiting - Elizabeth DiLauro
As part of a comprehensive system of support for families with young children, home visiting programs help to ensure that families facing obstacles—such as those caused by stress, language barriers, geographic and social isolation, and poverty—receive the support they need to nurture their child’s healthy development. Efforts to support home visiting programs continue to grow in states and communities, and an opportunity exists at the federal level to significantly expand home
visiting programs. This opportunity presents a complex policy challenge, and professionals in the infant–family field have a critical role to play in helping policymakers understand the needs of infants, toddlers, and their families as they work to expand home visiting programs.
Assessing Home Visit Quality: Dosage, Content, and Relationships - Diane Paulsell, Kimberly Boller, Kristin Hallgren, and Andrea Mraz Esposito
Home visiting is a service delivery strategy, but the content and focus of home visiting, as well as the characteristics of home visitors and the targeted outcomes, vary across program models. Understanding what is common, what is unique, and what the targets of change are for a range of models can support identification of key factors that make home visits effective. The authors present information on several characteristics of home visits—dosage, content, and relationships—that may be important for assessing home visit quality across program models, measurement strategies that can be used to assess them, and examples of how quality measures are being used in the field for programmatic and research purposes.
The Home Visiting Coalition: A History of Collaboration - Jane Callahan, Bridget Gavaghan, Karen Howard, Melissa L. Kelley, Marvin Schwartz, and Sarah Walzer
The Home Visiting Coalition represents more than 75 organizations working together to articulate the effectiveness of home visiting to a range of policymakers and stakeholders in the early childhood field. Despite varying program goals and service delivery strategies, the Coalition participants share a commitment to expanding access to evidence-based home visiting services. The authors describe how the political and social climate toward home visiting has changed over the past decade as the national home visiting programs have worked together to effect positive change for infants, toddlers, and their families.
The Virginia Home Visiting Consortium - Catherine Bodkin
The Virginia Home Visiting Consortium (HVC) is a collaboration of public and private organizations which work to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of home visiting services throughout the state. The HVC identified service needs and gaps and has focused on increasing the interagency state and local partnerships so that resources are maximized toward achieving state-identified goals and families can receive comprehensive, coordinated, and timely services. The quality of home visiting services has been enhanced through systems development, training, and evaluation.
The Pew Home Visiting Campaign: Helping States Improve Quality, Evaluation, and Accountability - John Schlitt
The Pew Home Visiting Campaign was launched in 2009 by the Pew Center on the States to guide state policymakers toward smart investments in quality, voluntary home-based programs for new and expectant families. In light of the federal development and pressing needs of states, the campaign will assist states in several ways, including policy campaigns,
taking inventory of state home visiting policies, providing technical assistance and networking, and conducting research.
Infant Mental Health Home Visitation: Setting and Maintaining Professional Boundaries - Carla Barron and Nichole Paradis
Relationship-based infant mental health home visiting services for infants, toddlers, and their families intensify the connection between the personal and professional. To promote the therapeutic relationship and maximize the effectiveness of the intervention, home visitors must exercise good judgment, in the field and in the moment, to set and maintain appropriate, professional boundaries. The authors discuss the creation of professional boundaries, encouraging home visitors to apply “best practice” interventions on the basis of thoughtful evaluations of the setting and the nature of the family’s needs.
Home Visitation With Psychologically Vulnerable Families: Developments in the Profession and in the Professional - Brenda Jones Harden
The evidence of the benefits of home visiting has revealed varying results and little is known about the elements that make programs of value to the families at highest risk for dysfunction. The variability in the effects of home visiting programs is linked to many factors, including program content and goals, the family and community context, the use of evaluation for program improvement, and how well the program is implemented. The author addresses how structural (dosage, target, and
staffing) and process (relationships, theory of change, approach and activities) aspects of home visiting programs enhance their quality and, ultimately, their benefit to high-risk families and their young children.
PERSPECTIVES—Infant Mental Health Home Visiting Strategies: From the Parents’ Points of View - Deborah Weatherston
The author interviewed parents who had participated in infant mental health (IMH) home visiting programs in community mental health agencies in Detroit, Michigan, as part of a larger qualitative study exploring parents’ and practitioners’ perceptions of IMH practice. Parents were asked to describe what they remembered about the practitioner and the
intervention that was most useful or helpful. The author discusses the parents’ references to personal attributes of the home visitor as well as experiences that parents believed were crucial to successful IMH home visiting.
Also in This Issue:
Developing an Implementation Plan for Reflective Supervision - Sherryl Scott Heller
This article is an excerpt from A Practical Guide to Reflective Supervision (2009, ZERO TO THREE). This chapter explores how to develop an implementation plan for bringing reflective supervision (RS) into an organization. The authors describe (a) how to organize the planning process, (b) how to determine the key features of the RS model, and (c) what to consider when designing an RS program for an organization.
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