The research is clear, parenting is critical to a child’s successful development.  That is why so many of you work so hard to promote high quality parenting in the families you serve.  Since parenting is a major goal in family service programs, it makes sense to adopt a parenting assessment to guide services with families and to document their outcomes.  While being trained to assess parenting, many family service providers tell us that careful observation of parent-child interaction is a very new experience for them, and that it really opens their eyes to valuable insights they hadn’t thought of before training.  These insights then guide their work with families.

Guest Contribution by:

Alison Fennell, MA, LPC, ACS

Mental Health Manager/Clinical Supervisor

NORWESCAP Early Head Start/Head Start

In an earlier post, I described how NORWESCAP Early Head Start implemented an observational parenting assessment, which our Early Head Start site reviewers found a highlight of our program.  With Early Head Start’s current spotlight on School Readiness, we are providing specific services to help parents prepare their children for school.  We now incorporate parenting assessments into our reflective supervision with Home Visitors by scheduling quarterly meetings with each staff person specifically to reflect upon their assessments. 

 Guest Contribution by:

Nancy Seibel,  Keys to Change 

  Visit Nancy at www.keystochangelifecoaching.com

Powerful Questions

You know a powerful question when you hear one.  It captures your attention.  It makes you stop and think. Something new becomes clear to you as you consider the question.  Powerful questions can be quite simple.  Powerful questions avoid communicating judgment.  Instead they focus on what can be learned (Williams & Menendez, 2007).  Often, helping others is less about knowing the right thing and more about asking the right question (Hyatt, 2012).

Everyone who assesses parenting has the ultimate aim of helping children develop to be healthy and well-adjusted.  More than a decade of experience with assessing parenting has taught us that quality supervision is key to the successful implementation of parenting assessment.  Just as supervision is seen as key to the delivery of high quality family services (for more see, Putting Reflective Supervision into Practice (November, 2010). Journal of Zero to Three Vol. 31 (2), S. Scott Heller and L. Gilkerson, A Practical Guilde to Reflective Supervision (2009). Zero to Three, and R. Parkalani and N. L. Seibel (2001). Being in Charge: Reflective Leadership in Infant/Family Programs, Zero to Three - all available at the Zero to Three Bookstore).