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VOICES OF HOME VISITORS IN ONE EARLY HEAD START PROGRAM 1
Tracy Collins and Catherine Ayoub
Harvard Graduate School of Education
Early Education Services is a mature Early Head Start program that combines home and center-based services and in which home visitors are responsible for direct provision of services to families. In a series of open-ended, one-on-one interviews with Tracy Collins, a member of the Harvard Graduate School of Education research team, home visitors were asked about their work and professional development. They depicted professional development not simply as something that takes place through training and supervision, but as a path traveled in their work with families and children. Analysis of the interview data focused on home visitors' talk about their actual work, including how they plan for and carry out home visits, examples of decisions made while in a family's home, and their reflections on the satisfaction derived from relationships that work well and frustration with those that do not. The qualitative nature of the present study provided the opportunity to hear home visitors' voices as they spoke of their work with Early Head Start families. Throughout the interviews, home visitors' passion for working with families and children was apparent. Following are excerpts from the interviews: Home visitors see their first task as establishing and maintaining relationships with the family:
- [The work of home visiting] is all about the relationship. (Sybil)2
- I've seen the power of that healing relationship work wonders. I've never met a family that didn't want things to be better. It's not because I come and say, "Oh, [you] should do this and this." It's because somebody nonjudgmental is coming every week and asking how you're doing and caring about you when you've never had that. I see great potential for things to get better in a family [through home visiting]. It's definitely a process of learning about each other, how strong they are and how much they can take. (Randi)
Home visitors explain how they see their work with families as centering around, but not limited to, child development:
- Our main focus here is child development, [but] there's a lot
of different things that go into [that]. (Lynn)
- We do parent education, case management, and early childhood
education. We blend those into a home visit, leaning more on early
childhood education according to the family's needs. (Tammy)
- Home visiting is a different opportunity--it's one of those things that can't really be explained until you do it. A stereotypical home visit doesn't exist; it's a very interwoven process. (Carla)
Home visitors also must deal with many challenges: finding ways to connect with families with histories of difficult or unsuccessful relationships, reassessing or reestablishing connections with families, and being willing to recognize how their own personal histories may interact with those of the families they serve:
- You've got to pick up on the priorities the family has, then
go in through that door. I had one [mom] who used to dismiss me;
[she] had a limit on how long she could tolerate me. (Tammy)
- What they'll do is [not] show up. They won't call and cancel--they
usually just won't be there. It's easier for them to not be there
than to say, "I can't deal." (Sara)
- Sometimes it's really hard, even if you have a good relationship
with [a family], you're not sure what's going on for them, what
they're really thinking about. You can just kind of miss the mark
[sometimes]. (Hayley)
-
I've messed up. I know everybody does. [Those are] opportunities to take the time to check in and assess if it's working [for the family] or not. (Carla)
- I have to think it through, [ask myself] what's going on, why am I so upset over this? And then I look back and go, "Aah, she reminds me of me." It really is amazing because you have to be in touch with yourself, too. (Sara)
These examples illustrate some of the many levels at which home visitors approach their work with families. Findings from this study may help inform training and supervision of home visitors, as well as supplement more quantitative methods used in evaluating Early Head Start services provided through the home-visiting model.
1Based
on Collins, T.E. "Home Visitors in Early Intervention Programs: How
Parenting Beliefs and Practices Influence Their Work with Families."
Harvard Graduate School of Education Qualifying Paper, 2000.(back)
2The
names of all participants have been changed.(back)
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