Baby TALK:  A Community Builds a Trustworthy System to Support Parents of Young Children

November 03, 2011

Baby TALK unites parents, schools and communities into a trustworthy community system to support and nurture their very young children. Baby TALK has developed a model to “cast a net” over a community to identify and screen every family with a baby in order to identify needs and connect families with resources. Relationships with partner agencies provide layers of program support. Communities outside Decatur, Illinois are using this model with success.

In the 1980’s, educators became aware of the importance of the early years of life in supporting optimal human development (National Commission on Excellence in education, 1983). With this growing awareness, many schools realized they would need to collaborate with communities to nurture young children. Decatur, Illinois is a mid­sized Midwest­ern city with a large proportion of low­ income families; 67% of school children receive free or reduced hot lunch. In 1986, representatives of the school district, public library, public health department, two community hospitals, and an adult literacy program met to consider ways to provide greater support to parents during the first three years of their children’s lives. To do so, they knew professionals working in educa­tion, health care and social services would need to build trusting relationships with parents in the early years of children’s lives. This group devel­oped Baby TALK, a program model for support­ing parents and encouraging early literacy. Pro­fessional early childhood parent educators began visiting parents of newborns at local hospital obstetric units, learning about families’ needs, encouraging them in the nurture of their babies, and supplying the parents with information about child development and books to start their babies’ home libraries. Baby TALK soon established a mission which would drive the effort: to positively impact child development and nurture healthy parent-child relationships during the critical early years.

This modest beginning evolved into a system through which every family giving birth in De­catur is met and supported based on individualneeds. Baby TALK has something to offer par­ents from every demographic, from parents with advanced degrees to parents who have not yet graduated from high school, and also offers a number of programs which blend families from different cultures. Baby TALK has identified that this community­wide approach makes a differ­ence for school readiness as well as promotes healthy parent­child relationships (Baby TALK Curriculum, 2009).

Critical Concepts

Over 23 years of working with families, BabyTALK has developed a comprehensive curricu­lum for use in a variety of program settings and with diverse populations. This curriculum is based on Baby TALK’s Mission and is informed by a body of ideas forming the program’s “Critical Concepts:”

• “Tell me about your baby.” Establishing parents as “experts” and honoring all they al­ready know about their children.
• “Going where families are.” Designing programs to meet families at locations con­venient to their needs.
• “Coming alongside.” Joining families’ sys­tems rather than asking them to join the sepa­rate systems of the many agencies that serve them.
• “Building relationships.” Approaching with empathy—on every level—opens doors.  Put­ ting professionals’ agendas aside in favor of addressing parents’ issues.
• “Collaboration.” Sharing resources with community partners to facilitate best results for children.
• “Systems building.” Organizations strat­egizing to bring their services together for families in a way that serves them seamlessly and efficiently.
• “Parallel process.” Recognizing that the ethics and strategies for supporting families also facilitate our work with professional col­laborators.
• “Facing difficult issues.” Being willing to have hard conversations with parents and with colleagues.
• “Becoming ever better.” Using reflective practice for professionals who work with families to hone their skills for greater effec­tiveness.

The Trustworthy System

Child developmentalist Erik Erikson (1963) de­fined a child’s first critical task as learning trust versus mistrust. Baby TALK maintains that dur­ing the period in which parents are raising their infants, parents are also learn­ing about whether or not they can trust the system of care which supports them. Many parallel processes support what the program identifies as the “Trustworthy System of Care” (Baby TALK Profes­sional Curriculum, 2009). The same methods that enable par­ents to nurture their children can be used effectively in pro­fessionals’ encounters with parents and in professionals’ work with each other.

The last decade has dem­onstrated that communities outside Decatur can fos­ter this dynamic by using a similar approach. While needs and opportunities may be different in ev­ery community, the following “Twelve Words” establish an effective mechanism for reaching young families:

Build a system. Identify others interested in serving young families in your community. Learn about their assets and services, and discover op­portunities to assist one another in meeting goals for families. Establish a system of communica­tion for ongoing support of families. 

Screen every family. “Cast a Net” over your tar­geted population in order to identify who is rais­ing children and learn about families. Screening may include outreach to hospitals, clinics or other community locations where parents and children may access services.

Identify the need. Use this screening to identify which families may face the greatest challeng­es in raising their children, particularly as those challenges relate to parents’ age, education, or lack of family support. Identify which families are already being served by other agencies, and which ones have needs that can be addressed ei­ther through the program or other community re­sources. Make appropriate referrals immediately to demonstrate respect for families.

Deliver appropriate services. Families with multiple risk factors may enter a system of case management with purposeful, frequent encoun­ters through home visits or other points within the system of care. Families with fewer risk factors may be served less intensively through group services offered through the community’s
various programs.

Community Programs 

Baby TALK’s reach has grown exponentially as a result of the community system that sponsors it. Collaborations with the following partners bring together services for families:

• Richland Community College--a Family Lit­eracy program in which parents study Eng­lish as a Second Language or earn their GED (Quigg & Mandernach, 1995)
• Decatur Public Library--Lapsits and BabyTALK Times at the library, serving families of every description (Gross, 1998, and Quigg, 2005). Baby TALK and  Decatur Public Li­brary developed a parent manual, Babies & Books: A Joyous Beginning (Quigg & Gross, 2008), to give to new parents within the con­text of newborn hospital visits.
• Decatur School District--an alternative mid­dle/high school for pregnant and parenting teens. 
• Decatur Memorial Hospital--an early in­tervention program of integrated therapy to children under three who have a disability or a delay. 
• Macon County Health Department and the Community Health Improvement Center-education and encouragement to families served by the WIC program as well as fami­lies receiving regular pediatric care. 
• St. Mary’s Hospital and Decatur Memorial Hospital--work with pregnant women in the prenatal clinics of both hospitals in prepara­tion for parenting and work with families of newborns on the obstetric units. 
• Millikin University--interns in Early Child­hood Education and Nursing who provide volunteer services as part of their curricula. 
• The Millikin-Decatur Symphony Orchestra--an annual community Lullaby Concert where everyone (even the players) wears their paja­mas.
• Central Christian Church--space for many of these programs to take place. 

Key to the success of these and other pro­grams is the mechanism of “Casting a Net” over the entire child­rearing population. By meeting every family at the hospital, the needs of families can be matched with the resources in the com­munity, resulting in agencies successfully deliv­ering their services, and more families finding the resources they need for success. 

What Difference does it Make?

For many years Decatur School District used the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) to measure incoming kindergartners’ language readiness. Scores for children lagged behind na­tional norms.  Beginning in 1991, Baby TALK compared the PPVT scores of children whose families had received program services to chil­
dren of families who had not.  General trends in the communities using the program indicate that Baby TALK seems to positively impact the re­ceptive language skills of incoming kindergart­ners (Mandernach, 1994).

In 1992, this hopeful development led BabyTALK to redouble its efforts, working more in­tensively with low­ income families who receive medical services at the health department or community health clinic. By this point, outreach efforts had saturated the community so that vir­tually all entering kindergartners who had been born in Decatur had been served by the program (Baby TALK Professional Curriculum, 2009). 

Baby TALK beyond Decatur, Illinois 

Some of Baby TALK’s most significant work is now being replicated in communities outside Il­linois. Some examples include:

• Tuscaloosa, Alabama was looking for a way to raise the academic achievement of children across the community. The University of Ala­bama Child Development program sent staff to Decatur to study the model, attend training and return home to establish a Baby TALK program in their own community. Educators now meet every family shortly after birth at local hospitals and spend time with parents and children at the public health department. 
• Lafayette, Indiana, home of Purdue Univer­sity, was challenged by a significant rise in child abuse. Community leaders recognized that they needed a coordinated system to “cast a net” to identify at-risk families. They chose Baby TALK as their organizing struc­ture, and implemented visits to newborns’ families at hospital obstetric units. 

“Becoming Ever Better”

Baby TALK is committed to increasing effectiveness in professionals who work with parents of young children, having trained more than 2000 professionals since 1989. The Baby TALK Professional Association maintains connections with those professionals who also access updat­ed materials and maintain current certifications. Monthly newsletters, an internet community, re­gional networks, and an annual meeting allow for the exchange of ideas, information and ongo­ing technical support. 

Conclusion

Schools are eager to support parents in preparing children for school success. Within communi­ties a variety of resources may assist parents in making the most of their children’s early years, but often these programs struggle to reach target­ed families. Baby TALK provides for a system which can “cast a net” to identify young families and deliver appropriate services. Such a system has been demonstrated to have a positive impact on child development.


"Baby TALK: A Community Builds a Trustworthy System to Support Parents of Young Children"
The Delta Kappa Gamma Bulletin, Winter 2010, Vol. 76-2
Quigg, C. (2010)
The Delta Kappa Gamma Society International
Austin, Texas

References
Baby TALK. (2009).  Baby TALK professional curriculum. Decatur, IL: Author.

Erikson, E. (1963). Childhood and society (2nd ed.) New York: Norton.

Gross, K. (1998). Baby TALK: Still growing a decade later. Illinois Libraries,
80 (3), 124­128.

Mandernach, J. (1994). Effects of parenting education on children’s verbal abilities upon entering kindergarten.   Baby TALK Professional Curriculum. Decatur, IL: Baby TALK.

National Commission on Excellence in Education. (1983). A nation at risk: The imperative for educational reform.  Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Quigg, C., & Gross, K. (2008). Babies & books: A joyous beginning Decatur, IL: Baby TALK.

Quigg, C., & Mandernach, J. (1995). Baby TALK: Language, literature and love for infants. In M. Matthias & B. Gulley (Eds.), Celebrating family literacy through intergenerational programming (pp. 46-51). Olney, MD: Association for Childhood Education International.

Quigg, C. (2005). Baby TALK Lapsits: Empowering librarians for early childhood leadership. Illinois Libraries, 85(3), 16­19.