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Parent Coaching to Promote Kindergarten Readiness
Carly Roberts of Overdeck Family Foundation opened the session by providing an overview of the Foundation’s Early Impact portfolio, which includes a focus on families as a part of its efforts to ensure that all children enter kindergarten with the skills they need to succeed. She described some of the evidence that shows parent coaching supports families in building strong parent-child relationships and promoting language, literacy and social-emotional development. She explained how coaching can be embedded into a range of contexts to engage and support parents as their children move through the stages of development and offered several examples of proven parent coaching strategies.
Marena Burnett of Centering Healthcare Institute (CHI) and Stephen Hannon, Ph.D. of LENA provided a deeper dive into two of the parent coaching strategies that Roberts referenced. Burnett explained how CHI’s CenteringPregnancy and CenteringPediatrics offer a billable group care model that promotes parent confidence and community building and is helping to reduce the risk of preterm births and racial disparities. Hannon described the LENA Start program and explained how LENA’s “talk pedometer” can be integrated into parent coaching strategies to measure and increase the conversational turns between parents and children that promote early language and brain development. Burnett and Hannon also explained the many ways in which their organizations are working with both local and national funders to improve, implement, scale and sustain their programs.
Malai Amfahr of United Way of Story County and Suzanne Harbin of Community Foundation of Northwest Georgia shared how they are supporting parent coaching and family engagement strategies in their local communities. Amfahr described how United Way is working with local partners to implement LENA and other caregiver engagement programs, stressing the high return on investment these programs deliver. Harbin introduced the research-based Talk With Me Baby program that engages health care professionals involved in labor and delivery as “Language Nutrition coaches” who encourage families to engage in conversational turns with their new babies beginning at birth.
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