How to Help Parents of Young Children: The Touchpoints Model

Our focus instead should be on developing a system where providers are thinking preventively and where parents’ ethnic, religious, and lifestyle attributes are valued. Rather than treating a pregnant teenager as a failure, which will turn her away and mitigate our opportunity for successful interaction with her, we could accept her pregnancy, point to the potential future opportunity for her baby, and offer her our support. If we, as supportive providers, can offer the necessary information and modeling for the parents to understand their young child’s development and to enhance it, we can play a crucial role toward the success of the family system. For the past several years, I have been working on the Touchpoints model. 3 Touchpoints are periods during the first three years of life during which children’s spurts in development result in pronounced disruption in the family system. Touchpoints are like a map of child development that can be identified and anticipated by both parents and providers. Thirteen touchpoints have been noted in the first three years, beginning in pregnancy. They are centered around caregiving themes that truly matter to parents (e.g., feeding, discipline), rather than traditional milestones. The child’s negotiation of the points can be seen as a source of success for the family system. Awareness of these touchpoints and strategies of dealing with them can help reduce negative patterns that might otherwise result in problems in the areas of sleep, feeding, toilet training, etc. The timing of touchpoints may be somewhat delayed for a premature or fragile infant, but they will be even more important as opportunities for supporting their anxious parents. The guiding principles of the Touchpoints model can be found in Table 1. Professionals can use these touchpoints as a framework for each encounter with families during the first three years of a child’s life. Several guiding assumptions about parents form the core of Touchpoints’ practice with families (see Table 2). Together, professionals and the parents can discover themes that recur and strategies to negotiate upcoming challenges. For example, for 4-month-olds, one can predict that there will soon be a burst in cognitive awareness of the environment. The baby will be difficult to feed. He will stop eating to look around and to listen to every stimulus in the environment. To parents’ dismay, he will begin to awaken again at night. Yet, when parents understand this period as a natural precursor to the rapid and exciting development that follows, they will not need to feel as if it represents failure. From the Touchpoints framework, the guidance or “scaffolding” professionals can give parents is supportive rather than prescriptive. Anticipatory guidance is not just delivery of “expert advice,” but having a dialogue, a shared discussion around how the parents feel and would react in the face of new challenges. This is, in part, based on how they have dealt with related issues in the past. Parents find it reassuring that bursts and regressions in development are to be expected. The concept of overlap in different lines of development is often a shift in thinking for parents, who without this concept would often question their own care-giving efficacy. In the face of their children’s behavioral regressions, they wonder what they are doing wrong. Sharing these touchpoints helps parents feel more confident in themselves and in their child.