Home visiting matters because families matter and because early childhood is the
most important time in a child's development. The most important part of
that is the relationships - the attachment with mom and dad and baby - that really
sets the foundation for all future learning in life, for all future success.
They go into the homes of families and they are the hands and feet of visiting
angels to support families, to hear, to be to be seen, to be heard, and to be known
in their communities and start their lives off well.
Well, home visiting matters because it's the first, it's the first step into giving
the tools and resources that families need to actually be productive for them
and their child and to pivot their family to the right place in life in the
future.
I had my own home visitor with my third child. It felt like I had somebody to
talk to, to visit, to guide me, to give me strength, to show me how not only how to
be a mom but how to connect with my child so then I wanted to become
a home visitor myself and I took the job and I loved it I thought it was beyond
amazing, I met some beautiful and wonderful mothers that just needed a
little touch and a little care and it brought a lot of life into my life and
it brought a lot of change, just showing a better world to our mothers to be
amazing.
Home-visiting is one of the few instruments that we have for really
making a difference in the lives of young families. Home visiting is able to
do things that other services are not able to accomplish. The fact that it
happens in the home is a real advantage. Here we're able to go in, we're able to
better assess a family situation, we're also in an atmosphere if we've been
invited in, to where it's easier to build that trusting relationship that's
essential to having a positive impact on that family.
Home visiting matters because early experiences matter. Baby's brains are
growing at a rapid rate between the ages of 0 to 3. In fact it's growing more
rapidly than it does in their entire lives, and it's during this time that
positive relationships and experiences make all the difference in healthy brain
development. Home visitors partner with parents to make sure that families and
babies get off to the best start.
I think of home-visiting as being a really important tool in the service
array of early childhood programs to support families in the creation of
healthy kids and ultimately the creation of healthy communities.
Home visiting matters because it changes the trajectory of families. So we have
these strong families who want to do better and sometimes they could use a
little mentoring, a little guidance, maybe the things that some of us get from our
parents actually that sort of help us make the right choices. For many of the
families that we serve we hear home visitors say I'm often the only person.
I'm the only person that that can help them sort of talk about the things that
they need to decide and make the choices that they need to decide, so it's really
a resource for those families and I would say we have a lot of families
where when I tell their stories people say wow that family's amazing! They went
from being homeless to both being employed and mom's going to school and
that family's amazing, but the thing is most of the families are amazing,
and it just takes a little bit of support around them to bring that out.