First 1,000 Days: Make parent engagement meaningful


  • September 27, 2018
  • /   Shannon Nickinson
  • /   early-learning
parent panelists
To truly help our youngest children, we’ve got to help their parents.
But sometimes, despite good intentions, service providers and policymakers end up making parents feel like an afterthought. 
But several speakers at the second First 1,000 Days Summit in West Palm Beach reinforced the need to make parents partners in interventions and programs aimed at helping get better outcomes for their children.
Katherine Rosenblum is director of the woman and infant mental health program at the University of Michigan. Her talk, “Zero to Thrive!” focused on the way that relationships are key to every aspect of a young child’s well-being.
“Relational health is a vital sign, like taking your blood pressure,” Rosenblum said. “It is a buffer of risk factors and it can be modified through early intervention.”
“Early back-and-forth experiences are fundamental to building our brains,” she said. “It is more efficient biologically and economically to get things right early.”
Place-based services reduce barriers that keep parents from getting the help they need. That means providers must meet parents where they are, and offer them concrete strategies they can take home that very day and put into practice.
Dara Griffin, a Project LAUNCH family and community engagement specialist, consults on strategies for engaging parents with respect and in a sense of partnership.
True family engagement, she noted, is not just inviting parents to be in the room and at the table as decisions are made about programs and projects that affect them and their children.
It is inviting them into the conversation and making them part of the process from the beginning. This form of “transformational engagement” includes shared responsibility and strength-based collective actions with purposeful connections between providers and parents.
That’s opposed to what Griffin called “Random Acts of Involvement,” one-time actions or events with a one-time purpose. 
Helping parents — even those who come from troubled backgrounds — break through the traumas or negative experiences of their own pasts to do more ad better for their kids is truly engaging a family, Griffin said. 
It can mean for providers, for examples, looking hard for “what is beautiful and strong in the families I serve,” Griffin said. “What is working already, and can I find it (in this family) and build on it?”
If you can find it, and build on it, you can end up with parents like the four who participated in a parent panel at the conference. 
The panel included Sarah Sheppard, a mom who now has more than a decade in recovery for substance misuse and a bachelor’s degree who works as a parent partner with Healthy Start Coalition of Flagler/Volusia; Talethia Edwards, a wife and mother of seven, including some with health complexities, who is a committed community volunteer and parent advocate in Leon County; Karina Banos, a mother of an autistic son and native of Columbia with a degree in biomedical engineering; and Devin Coleman, an author, consultant and advocate from Jacksonville, who is the communications director and executive board member of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition. He also serves on the board of the Duval Regional Juvenile Detention Center Advisory Council.
They each spoke about their struggles to become, as Edwards calls it, “bilingual and fluent in agency speak.” 
They also spoke about the ways that each of them ultimately found one person or one agency that truly engaged them. Usually by taking a moment to see the human being asking for help on the other side of that desk. 
“Sometimes when we sit in front of you and ask for help, we just need you to see is as people,” Edwards said.
Coleman, who as a dad who earned custody of his young daughter, said that he thinks of it now as being a glass poured full to the brim with water, that is now overflowing. 
“Now I see it as my job to show as many men around me as I can to take up the overflow,” he said. “It challenges me to learn more to keep filling those glasses.”

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