I will admit it.  When I see a friend whose toddler is rocking the paci all day every day, I struggle not to judge.  This, from a mom whose 7-year-old climbs in her bed with her each night.  Parenting is a series of tough choices, choosing the battles worthy of fighting and those you can win, all while under the scrutiny of others like me who feel so strongly about the evidence regarding what is best for young children.  When I see a young child at the store at night, my first thought is, “oh, poor little guy, should be home in bed.”  And then I check myself.  I have no idea what that child’s day is like regarding schedule, family routines or priorities.  I know I am not alone, though.  I know there are many of us who struggle to honor families who make choices contradictory to what we believe to be best for young children.

Check Your Biases

There are many “hot topics” in parenting and early childhood development.  It’s arguably the period of development best supported by research and most flooded with tips and tools for navigating.  Popular sites like Babycenter cover all these topics including sleep, feeding, potty training, play, technology, and behavior with listicles for solving all your parenting struggles.  As early interventionists, we are only one source of parenting support, and we may not always be able to compete with grandma, environment, and the internet.  So, how do we strive to honor families who make child rearing choices in conflict with our professional beliefs?  I have developed my own listicle to add to the mix!

1. Check Your Biases. Is this a safety issue?  If the answer is no, consider your biases.  We hold our professional beliefs dear, as we should!  However, truly family centered practices build on family strengths and priorities.  If the 2-year-old’s pacifier is not a priority or concern for the family, it does not need to be one for us either.
2. Understand The Why. Talking with families about what motivates their decision making provides us with insight into why others do what they do.  Why does the family choose co-sleeping?  Are there enough sleeping spaces in the house for all family members?  Is co-sleeping standard practices in the family’s culture?  Listening first allows us to present the facts in a way that may support the family need while also addressing the concern, particularly if it is a safety concern.
3. Broaden Your Lens. There is no one right way.  Truly family centered practices trust families to be the expert on their own needs which simultaneously requires professionals to follow families’ leads.  If we approach each unique family with our own narrow lens for what is best, we miss the opportunities each family presents to problem solve together, to extend our views, and to find strategies that work.

I know it isn’t easy.  I know our professional and personal experiences have led us to these beliefs for good reasons, with a grounding in evidence and in best practices.  The challenge, then, is in how we make ourselves available for the beliefs of the family, particularly when they are contradictory to our own.

How do you honor families in your work who make choices that conflict with what you know to be true?

For more info on this topic, be sure to watch Jen’s archived webinar, Unpacking our Biases in Early Intervention, on the Virginia Early Intervention Professional Development Center’s 2017 Talks on Tuesdays Recordings page.

Jen Newton is an Assistant Professor of Early Childhood/Early Childhood Special Education in the School of Education at Saint Louis University. She worked as an early interventionist with infants and toddlers with disabilities or at risk for school failure in home settings before entering the classroom as an inclusive prekindergarten teacher in North Carolina’s More At Four program and later as a parent educator on an Early Reading First grant. She earned a doctorate in Special Education from the University of Kansas in 2011 and spent four years preparing inclusive educators at James Madison University prior to joining faculty at SLU. Her research examines inclusive teaching and learning, early childhood teacher preparation, and university/school partnerships.

The post True Confessions: Checking My Biases with Family Centered Practices appeared first on Early Intervention Strategies for Success.

After earning a masters degree in education at the University of Kansas, I moved to North Carolina and accepted my first professional position as an Infant-Toddler Specialist providing home based services to infants and toddlers with identified developmental differences or those at risk for future delays.  This opportunity put me directly in the trenches with families and I embraced the challenges.  Armed with my minimal field experience, and hard-earned book knowledge, I felt confident I could help families help their babies in their day to day routines.  I know now that I learned much more from each of them than they had any hope of learning from me.

Fast Forward Nine Years…

Fast forward nine years and I was pursuing a doctorate in special education.  I had the privilege to attend a three day primary service provider boot camp for Kansas early intervention providers with Dathan Rush and M’Lisa Sheldon of the Orlena Hawks Puckett Institute.  I developed relationships with providers and trainers, delved into the research around natural learning environments, family centered practices, primary service provider model, Dunst, Trivette, McWilliams, you name it, I was reading about it and writing about it and talking about it.

Then I had twins.

They were strong and perfect and unique, each in her own way.  Until Maelle wouldn’t – couldn’t – stop puking.  We ran tests.  We tried formula.  We tried really expensive formulas.  We vowed to buy a new couch – vomit soaked as it was.  At four months, her pediatrician first uttered the dreaded phrase – failure to thrive.

We left the pediatrician, Maelle crying and throwing up, me crying and looking up the number for our local early intervention agency.  When the woman asked my concerns, I, with all my training and experience in early intervention, said, “ I just want her to eat!”  As those words left my mouth, I knew I had moved away from the professional in the equation and become a parent just like so many others I knew.  I needed support, guidance, and reassurance.  I needed to talk it through, to listen, to make a plan.  I needed an early intervention team.

The provider who facilitated our intake was a woman I worked with at the primary service provider model training.  Navigating this dynamic challenged me in new ways.  I felt vulnerable, merging a professional relationship into a personal one, opening my home, my family, my fears, and my perceived failures to somehow who, just weeks ago, may have thought I was knowledgeable.  I felt like a professional imposter.  I could talk about the work but I could not help my own daughter, my own family.

Lessons Learned

Looking back on it, a few things stand out to me about that time in my life, both professionally and personally:

• Honesty is harder than it sounds. I’ve encouraged families to open up to me, honestly report their routines, challenges, feelings, and dreams.  Only when the tables were turned did I realize how much I did not want to talk to this person.  She was lovely, warm, and accepting, but the intimate details of our family life were so sensitive at that time that I struggled to be fully honest.

Lesson:  Invest in building trust.  It is not inherent in the relationship, it must be earned.

• Writing functional and meaningful goals is also harder than it sounds. When it came time to write Maelle’s IFSP, I said (it sounds like a joke after teaching functional goal writing for so long), “I want her to walk.”  My primary service provider dutifully replied, “How will Maelle walking increase her participation in your family?”  Well played.

Lesson:  The developmental model is ingrained in the thinking of parents.  We want to know that they can do what they “should” do next.  The prompt given by my provider redirected my thinking to focus on Maelle and my family rather than on the developmental norms.  We all need that prompt.  Probably often. 

• “Comparison is the thief of joy.: Theodore Roosevelt felt my pain as I navigated parenting of twins.  I know there is a wide range of typical.  I know that cognitively.  However, when one walked and the other waited four months to follow in her footsteps, I received a lot of reminders about that wide range of typical.  More importantly, none of those reminders eased my heart about what Maelle was not yet doing.

Lesson:  Approach families with deep empathy.  Hearing that she would do it (whatever “it” was at the time) never made me feel better.  Instead, maybe say, “I know this is hard.  I am here to support you.”  I would have liked that a lot.

Brek and Maelle are first graders now.  They are strong and perfect and unique, each in her own way.

Jen Newton is an Assistant Professor of Early Childhood/Early Childhood Special Education in the School of Education at Saint Louis University. She worked as an early interventionist with infants and toddlers with disabilities or at risk for school failure in home settings before entering the classroom as an inclusive prekindergarten teacher in North Carolina’s More At Four program and later as a parent educator on an Early Reading First grant. She earned a doctorate in Special Education from the University of Kansas in 2011 and spent four years preparing inclusive educators at James Madison University prior to joining faculty at SLU. Her research examines inclusive teaching and learning, early childhood teacher preparation, and university/school partnerships.

The post A Professional Imposter: Reflections From an EI Provider/Mom appeared first on Early Intervention Strategies for Success.