These life-altering services transform the trajectory for Texas families with young children and help support parents as they experience challenges every parent faces. Whether a first-time mom, a family experiencing economic hardship, new fathers, young parents, or a single parent, family support home visiting services can help provide a foundation during the earliest and most critical years of a child's development, setting children and parents up for a life of health, education, and success.
Through mentorship and coaching of trained nurses, parent educators, family support providers or other early childhood professionals, parents are able to learn new skills we often take for granted - in the safety and comfort of their home. By removing barriers - physically and emotionally - parents and their children can focus on being engaged and ready to learn. The power of home visiting is in the approach of meeting families where they are.
TexProtects has released an updated Home Visiting Landscape report looking at the ins and outs of home visiting in the past few years. In our Home Visiting Advocacy Toolkit, we provide tips and tricks to engaging in the policymaking process and ensuring home visiting gets the recognition from the state that it needs. In the Future Direction of Home Visiting in Texas report, TexProtects and Child Trends project what these important programs hold for the coming years.
On March 19, 2020, Gov. Greg Abbott’s Emergency Declaration with guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and the Federal Administration of Children and Families immediately changed how we lived our lives. The changes touched everything in our communities, including how home visiting programs provide services to families.
Decades of research has repeatedly demonstrated the positive impact a variety of home visiting programs have across the lives of parents and their children. By building healthy, trusting, and long-lasting relationships, "home visitors" are able to connect and refer families to a much larger network of resources and services such as access to high-quality child or respite care, mental health services or concrete resources. As a result, the benefits are both immediate and long-lasting, changing the future for families and the communities in which they live and work.
Video property of the Texas HHSC Texas Home Visiting Program