Developmental Parenting: A Guide for Early Childhood Practitioners

When parents are warm, responsive, encouraging, and communicative—the key elements of developmental parenting—they lay the foundation for young children's school readiness, social competence, and mental health. That's why every early childhood professional needs this comprehensive, practical guide to building a developmental parenting program for the families they serve.

Unlike other approaches that limit parents to a "student" role, the proven, the parenting-focused model in this book shows home visitors how to put parents and other caregivers confidently in charge of guiding and supporting their young children's development. Home visitors and other early childhood professionals will learn the ABCs of facilitating developmental parenting:

• Attitudes. Be responsive, supportive, flexible, and culturally sensitive while looking for the family's strengths and building on them.
• Behaviors. Actively encourage positive parent–child interaction, support developmental parenting behaviors, establish a collaborative partnership with parents, use family activities as learning opportunities, and involve other family members.
• Content. Provide parents with clear and relevant information on child development, determine the best curricula for selecting and adapting parent–child activities, and learn to use assessments skillfully to evaluate child progress and parenting behaviors.

This how-to guidebook includes all the support early childhood professionals need to facilitate developmental parenting effectively. Program directors will get step-by-step guidance on supervising and evaluating the program, and professionals who work directly with parents will get easy-to-implement strategies, case studies of successful interactions, and tips and advice from other practitioners.

With this research-based and reader-friendly book, early childhood professionals will learn to put parents in charge of guiding their child's development—resulting in strong parent-child bonds, healthy families, and improved school readiness.

**Includes the Home Visit Rating Scales (HOVRS), an observation tool with seven rating scales for practitioners and supervisors to assess the quality of home visits from direct observation.

See how this product helps strengthen Head Start program quality and school readiness.

Dr. Roggman is Professor in the Department of Family, Consumer, &Human Development at Emma Eccles Jones College of Education and Human Services, Utah State University. Dr. Roggman's research focuses on parenting and children's early development. She has extensive experience in home visiting research, integrating theory-based inquiry with program evaluation, and training practitioners. She is a strong methodologist with expertise in observational data collection and longitudinal analysis and has authored several observation instruments used extensively by researchers and practitioners. She was principal investigator of a local research team for the national Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project.

Dr. Boyce is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Family, Consumer, and Human Development and a Research Scientist at the Emma Eccles Jones Center for Early Childhood Education and Early Intervention Research Institute at Utah State University. Dr. Boyce currently teaches child development and child guidance courses. She has conducted numerous assessments with children with disabilities and those who are at risk for disabilities. She has also provided parenting support to families with children with disabilities through home visits and parenting groups. Her research has focused on facilitating children’s language and emergent literacy development through everyday parent–child conversations, self-regulation and development through parenting and preschool practices, and the creation and use of meaningful literacy materials. This work has been funded for Migrant Head Start families by the Administration on Children, Youth and Families and for young children with disabilities and their families through the Office of Special Education Programs.

Dr. Innocenti is Director of the Research and Evaluation Division at the Center for Persons with Disabilities and Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Emma Eccles Jones College of Education and Human Services, Utah State University. Dr. Innocenti has over 30 years of experience working with infants and young children at-risk and with disabilities and their families in multiple research and model demonstration projects. Using an interdisciplinary model that recognizes the contribution of different disciplines and stakeholders, his research is conducted in and for communities. Recent projects focus on assessment and curriculum, home visiting effectiveness, and preschool intervention to prevent later special education.