Home visiting programs help parents learn child development skills

Home visiting programs help parents learn about child development skills. The free programs are for pregnant women and families with a child under age 5.

They are run by local governments and nonprofit organizations, and are funded largely through the federal Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting program started in 2010 as part of the Affordable Care Act.

In the Milwaukee area, home visiting programs include Empowering Families of Milwaukee and Direct Assistance for Dads Project overseen by the Milwaukee Health Department. Also offering the programs area Next Door, a nonprofit that focuses on early childhood education, and Children’s Wisconsin.

How can you apply for home visiting programs?

The Milwaukee Health Department application form is here: https://city.milwaukee.gov/Health/Services-and-Programs/MCH/visit.

More details about home visiting programs across the state are available on the website for the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families: https://dcf.wisconsin.gov/cwportal/homevisiting.

Why are home visiting programs important for young children?

Empowering Families of Milwaukee and the DAD Project are outgrowths of the growing awareness of the importance of the first three years of life in a child’s intellectual, emotional and physical development and parents’ influence on that development. This matters because by the time many children reach kindergarten or even preschool they already have fallen behind their peers. And studies have shown that this so-called achievement gap doesn’t narrow appreciably as children move through school.

How long do the home visiting programs last

The programs are free and consist of home visitors – registered nurses and social workers – who typically visit families for 60 to 90 minutes either weekly or once every two weeks. The programs, which generally begin before a child is born and can last two years.

What kind of training do home visitors receive?

The home visitors in Empowering Families of Milwaukee receive extensive training in how to build relationships, read cues, respond to difficult situations, help families set goals and the steps needed to realize them as well as learn about child development, parenting and community resources. The same goes for the home visitors in a similar program, the Direct Assistance for Dads Project, known as the DAD Project, for fathers. “They can’t just follow a script,” said Jon Korfmacher, a child psychologist and senior research fellow at the University of Chicago. “They need more specialized training. And they have to know how to partner with families – to really pay attention to the needs of the families and how to address those needs.” The Milwaukee Health Department’s home visiting programs are based on the Parents as Teachers model, one of the five models approved by Wisconsin for the federal program.

The curriculum for the model – developed over decades – totals thousands of pages online.

How home visiting programs help young kids with language development

Studies also have shown that the quantity and variety of words heard by a child – as well as the length of the utterances and, at least in some cultures, back-and-forth conversations – are important in acquiring language skills.

So, too, are so-called wh-questions – who, what, where, when and how.

Differences in the size of children’s vocabulary first appear at 18 months of age — and, again, language skills at the start of school strongly predict future success in school.

More than 40% of children are read to less than four days a week, and every day is the ideal. Further, children from affluent families – children at less risk of starting school behind their peers – are read to more on average than children from families with low incomes. Just 15 minutes a day, starting at birth, can have a significant influence on a child’s vocabulary.

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Home visiting programs help parents learn child development skills

Reporting by Guy Boulton, Special to the Journal Sentinel / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect