1.
Go to the “Family Perspective” section near the end of the Content Video from Kerry. Choose two of Kerry’s questions and answer here.
1.
2.
List at least 5 effective home visiting practices that the teachers indicate they are currently using with families.
1.2.
3.
4.
5.
What are two effective strategies from the training slides that you think are most important and why?
1.2.
In the home visit example video of using a cardboard box and materials available in the family home, give two observations of how the home visitor engages the parents in the child’s activities.
1.2. Roles of a Home Visitor
eclkc.ohs.acf.hhs.gov/teaching-practices/home-visitors-online-handbook/roles-home-visitor
Find a Head Start job near you or anywhere in the U.S.
Home Visitor’s Online Handbook
Home Visitor’s Online Handbook
Your first task is creating and maintaining a relationship with the family. You partner with the
family to understand their hopes and expectations for their child. As you observe and interact
with the family and child together, you help the parents maintain an accurate understanding
of their child’s learning and development. Research studies consistently show the most
important role of a home visitor is structuring child-focused home visits that promote parents’
ability to support the child’s cognitive, social, emotional, and physical development.
When a parent is distracted by personal concerns or crises, you balance listening to the
parent and honoring their choice to share concerns with you with eventually bringing the
focus back to the child. After assisting a parent in exploring relevant resources and supports,
you might say, “This sounds like a very hard time for you. I can see how upset you are. In
fact, I’ve been watching the baby and he looks very concerned about your feelings now.
What do you think it’s like for him to see you so upset?”
You also take every opportunity to notice and remark on positive actions or interactions on
the part of the parent. You bring a strength-based perspective, building on the parent’s role
as their child’s first and most important relationship. For example, “It’s wonderful you already
know how to comfort her.”
In addition to your work on child development, you work with other program staff and
community partners to coordinate such services as health, mental health, and oral health
services for the family. You offer annual health, vision, hearing, and developmental
screening. An important aspect of your work with some families is having strategies and
resources for managing a crisis.
1/2
In an ongoing way, you help the family move forward with their goals for well-being,
economic stability, and self-sufficiency.
Read more:
Home visiting, Parent-child relationships
, Teaching Practices
Last Updated: December 3, 2019
2/2
Hi everyone. Let’s take a look at the supports that we offer in families homes. Depending on your degree or what job you go into, you may be asked to provide some services in families homes. So I just wanted to let you know a little bit about what that’s like. I have done home visiting for many years and currently the families that I visit, either their child or the parent and its children actually who are infants and toddlers only birth to three and e to the child or the parent has a mental health diagnosis or concern, and That’s how they qualify for the home visits that I offer. And I’ve done a lot of other home visiting over the years too. So I just want to share with you my perspective on what home visiting is like and give you a taste of that in this video today. So what kinds of professionals do home visits is one thing. I will go over with you. What types of services are offered on home visits? And then why would we do home visiting instead of on-site visits? Write all of the places and organizations that offer home visiting also have a place of business or a place of where they are for services onsite. So it really is best practice and just how it all ties into your courses here, one of our outcomes is to research, practice, and implement positive community strategies that support and enhance and empower families to thrive. So I believe that home visiting is really across discipline practice. And it’s a way of serving families and young children. So it really fits well here with that, with one thing that we need to cover in our course. So what do professionals do on home visits? Here are some of the common things that I thought of. You could probably add to this list. Some of the things we do or support with parenting. Therapists go in home and there might be therapy for children or therapy for the family and child protection and therapy, all kinds of therapy, whether it’s mental health therapy or medical therapies, things like that. Chubb protect and protection and protective services can go in home and that includes law enforcement and people like that to health or medical appointments and then early childhood special education. Depending on what classes you’ve had and what you know, special education. The whole program for Birth to Three is in home. So they don’t come to school. The program is offered in their home as well. So let’s look at what types of services are offered on these home visits and what kinds of people mental health therapists can go in home education. And as I just said, Birth to Three Special Education is all at home. Social workers, public health and public health nurses, school and home Child Protective Services. Arms workers. Can look more up about that. We won’t get into that here, but they help people work on different kinds of skills. Life skills, respite care for families of young children. Sometimes they qualify for people to come in and help care for their children. Or they can get a personal care assistant for either medical or other disabilities. Court guardians going home, therapy and skills workers, Early Head Start and ECSC, both going home and offer services. County Schools, Medical, Infant and prenatal visits can be done. In homes. Every county has home visitors who going home, mental health and life skills, special needs, medical. So there’s all kinds of things that are happening in people’s homes. So why home visiting instead of on-site visits? I do encourage you just to pause here and think for a minute before I show you my next slide, what would be your answer is to this? When I do teach an in-person class, I ask the class to come up with reasons. Why do you think we do that? Why do we go into homes instead of just having the families come to us? Here are some of my answers and this is not an exhaustive list, it’s just the answers that I could come up with. Why home visiting instead of on-site visits? Well, children are more comfortable in their home setting. It’s a natural setting. They act more natural. You can see how they actually are in their homes. And then family routines and interactions are all more authentic. Think about when you’re coming to an offsite visit, how that changes a child’s behavior, how that changes appearance, comfort level. You don’t get to see the routines and things that really happen at home where you can help and just a whole different level when you’re in the home. It really is actually considered best practice for children birth to age three to serve them in their home whenever possible. The younger the child, the more they rely on their home environment. And so that’s one of the reasons for that. It’s very convenient for families. It doesn’t rely on their transportation and them getting their children ready to get out the door and get from one place to another. And so you just show up right at their home, whatever they’re doing at the time, they can welcome you. And it also might be required if it’s court ordered or if it’s child protective services related. A lot of in-home things are required just to make sure that things are happening for children that need to happen as far as their safety. So now what about the challenges of home visiting? So if you’re the home visitor, maybe you work for Head Start and you’ve been in the classroom and your director says, guess what? It’s time and moving you to the infant toddler home visiting program. And so now you need to figure out how to take your services into people’s homes. What are you worried about? What do you think the challenges are to the professionals that do home visits? Again, I do encourage you to pause. It would be great if we could have a conversation about this because students have all kinds of things come up and what they think home visiting might be like. And oftentimes many of those things are true that they don’t happen all the time. And other times the thing that they’re thinking aren’t true. So let me just tell you some of the things that I came up with. Again. You’re walking into the unknown each week, so you really don’t know, It’s not an environment that you are controlling. Its the families and environment that they are being vulnerable and opening themselves up and welcoming you in so you don’t know what you’re coming into each week, there can be surprises. There might be people there who you don’t know. There could be dangerous things going on. Depending on the family’s situation. The work is very emotionally activating. So taking care of yourself and being supported in the work I think is the most important. I would say that that’s probably one of the top challenges that home visitors say is that the, the work is very challenging emotionally. There’s a lot that you carry with you when you enter into someone’s home and they’re very, it’s very intimate work. So you really do carry a lot of emotion with you. Work that you do. Siblings and other family members are present. So it’s not like a class or a school environment or anything else for maybe just the parent and the child are coming in for the appointment. Anyone whose home is there, anyone who’s home might add to your visit, might interrupt your visits, things like that. Often a home visitor is alone. Sometimes there’s more than one person going on a home visit from a certain place. But often you are alone going into that visit. So that can be another challenge if you feel like you could rely on another person either for support or for talking afterwards about your perspectives on what’s happening. Of course, there are safety issues, all kinds of things that we have to think about. And how to exit situations and how to draw boundaries with parents and things like that about things that might be going on in the home that are either unsafe for the children, are unsafe for you to be there or both. And so for you just to have eyes and ears. We also as home visitors, visiting and very challenging situations over time. If you’ve been doing this work for several years, you lose a little bit of your concept of what safe and not safe. Because you kinda get used to it. So the safety issues can definitely be a challenge. Ruptures in the professional caregiver relationship are also a huge challenge because at times you might need to make a Child Protective Services report or you might do or say something that a parent doesn’t like. So then are they going to answer the door when you come next week? Are they going to answer your text messages about confirming their appointment and things like that. And so that does happen. And then it’s up to us to figure out how to repair that relationship again. Otherwise, we’re not serving that child and that family. So that can be very difficult to its close relationships. And that’s how relationships work. There are always challenges. So cancellations and no answer when arriving. That’s another challenge. All of a sudden you just don’t know what happened and you didn’t get to see the family that week. And some of it might be habitual if a family has a really hard time keeping appointments and keeping a routine, time with driving, using your own transportation. People wonder and worry about that. Usually your place of work will require you to use your own transportation, but they reimburse you for mileage, whether or not that actually covers what? The wear and tear on your vehicle and things like that. I don’t know. But depending on how much you do, it can almost cover your car payment. You are doing full-time home visiting as well, but of course, you have gas and oil changes and things like that. So people worry about their car and it can be a challenge. And then it also can take a lot of time depending on how big of scope of area you’re serving. And then large case loads is a very common complaint with professionals. It’s always a battle of people, organizations wanting to pile on the families and the people who are providing the services saying I can’t do that. Many families. We just have this recently at a workplace that I heard there was a new supervisor who didn’t understand home visiting and thought, well, only have 12 families, that’s 12 hours a week. What are you doing with the rest of your time? Well, as we can see from the list that we talked about and that we will talk about there’s a lot involved with each family. It’s not just one hour a week, it’s a lot more hours than that that you spend on serving families. Collaboration with other professionals involved. This can be a really positive thing, but it can also be really challenging. Maybe you’re going in giving certain parenting suggestions and working with parents in a certain way. And there might be another person going in the home or working with the family who’s telling them the opposite. So just working on those professional relationships can be very challenging, especially when you don’t agree and you don’t want to put the family in the middle. Okay. So how about the benefits of home visiting again, if you could cause you really will benefit from just pausing and thinking about this on your own before you see my answers. So what do you think? What are the benefits and the good things about home visiting? Well, here are some that I came up with. Home visiting as building strong, trusting relationships with caregivers and families. And that feels really good. It feels like the foundation of our work and we really can do that on home visits. And they’re one-on-one. I feel honored as a home visitor to be invited into their home. I know what that must feel like at times to have people coming into your home and visitors. I happened to be an introvert myself and don’t invite people to my house very often. So it’s like that, but it’s also just that vulnerability that they’re seeing how we live. They’re seeing how my houses, things like that. Another benefit, that there are always new challenges and new things observed. It does keep the work exciting. You always have a story. I always say every single week that I work in this field, I see or hear something that I have never seen or heard before. And that’s pretty amazing considering I’ve been doing this over 20 years. So it is a field where you can’t possibly get all heard of or you get burnt out maybe, but it’s not boring. There’s always something new. You get to know the families in a new way because they’re in their own element. In a way that you don’t get to know them when you’re out in a public place. You often when you’re home visiting, you’re working with the families of the highest need. This is because home visiting programs are very expensive. It’s not because all families don’t need them, right? But it’s because the families that are in the highest need are the ones who end up qualifying because the programs are very expensive to pay people to go out and meet with one family at a time. You can make lasting impacts early in a child’s life. So when you’re doing home visiting for these really little children, you are changing the trajectory for their whole life. If you can support the family and help that family and making some changes that make everything go better for them. Their relationship with their kids and they’re in their home life no matter what you’re working on. And then you’re usually part of an incredible team of professionals like you who really care about families and who want to make a difference. And who try their darned us to keep relationships up with families and keep going. So it’s really amazing to be a part of. And then also another benefit is collaborations with other agencies. When you’re home visiting. If you’re doing a really good job and you don’t have a super overwhelming cave fluid. You have time to collaborate with anyone else who’s working with the family. So it’s a lot of fun and it’s really powerful too. Okay, So here are some questions. After hearing all of this and thinking about home visiting that I would like you to answer. It’s so important for us to keep a parent’s perspective in mind. We could go into a situation and judge judge judge, everything we see that’s going on, but we need to think about the parent’s perspective and what that’s like having us come into their home. Or you’re not going to get anywhere. And you need to have that empathy and compassion along with, of course, knowing when you have to set a boundary or you have to report something. But in general, I want you to think about these five questions. Put yourself in the parents shoes. Maybe you had home visits at your home as a kid growing up, or maybe you’re a parent and you have home visits now for one of your children, if they have special needs or something like that. I just want you to think about what does it feel like to have someone come into your home? What might be two or three points about that, that you think about? What concerns might you have if you know that you’re going to have home visits from somebody new that you haven’t met before? What would you want to know ahead of time before the visits? What expectations do you have of that person? What are some things you expect of them if they’re coming into your home? What could make you cancel or not answer the door? If you had a home visitor come over. So again, thinking of the parents perspective, it’s really important. I can’t even stress enough how we need to think about that. I had home visits for one of my children when he was younger and I’m so thankful that I had that experience and then it gave me the parent perspective as well. So think about that for yourself. And I hope you found this interesting about home visiting and maybe it sparked something in you and it’s something you want to do for your career.
Order an Essay Now & Get These Features For Free:
Turnitin Report
Formatting
Title Page
Citation
Outline
