Early Head Start and Healthy Families Illinois have recently begun to provide birth to three services to specialized populations. Jayne Shower Easter Seal has worked with special needs babies for many years. What is missing is a unified, collaborative model to ensure that a parent with a child from birth to age three will receive the same high quality programming from all practitioners and that interactions with parents will reflect commonly shared assumptions and values. Working with parents of infants and toddlers is very different from the collaboration that occurs between educators and parents during the period we have classically assigned for education - beginning at preschool age. Everything possible should be done to ensure that it is the parent, not the practitioner doing the training, and that the parent feels qualified to do so.
Parents are their children's first and best role models, teachers, and mentors.