The stay-at-home order has upended some of California’s most crucial educational and health services for infants and toddlers — home visits and early intervention services — at a time when families may need them the most.
Home visiting programs send nurses, social workers and other trained professionals to the homes of low-income parents to give health and early education advice. They also help children meet milestones, like crawling, picking up objects, speaking their first words and playing. Speech therapists and others also conduct home visits to do early intervention with children who have developmental delays.
These home visitors are now making video calls, recording stories, dropping off learning materials on doorsteps and parking outside families’ homes to provide mobile hotspots, all to keep connecting with their clients.
Parents are referred to home visiting programs by doctors or other health care workers when they are pregnant or just had a baby, or by social service agencies or community-based organizations. About 32,000 children were served by home visiting programs in California in 2017-18, according to the California Budget and Policy Center, a nonprofit research organization that works to improve social service programs for low- and middle-income residents. Parents are referred to early intervention programs when their children are diagnosed with a developmental delay. Early intervention programs serve about 40,000 infants and toddlers with special needs in the state.
Studies have found home-visiting programs, such as the Nurse-Family Partnership, have long-term benefits for children’s reading and math skills, in addition to improving their health and mental health, and help mothers get high school diplomas or GEDs and better jobs. After Gov. Gavin Newsom expanded funding for home visiting last year, some advocates expect programs to be able to serve three times as many families by 2021.
Early learning advocates say the services provided by home visits are now more important than ever. Studies have shown some home visiting programs help prevent child abuse. Many advocates are concerned that child abuse could increase during the stay-at-home orders, with children and parents or guardians all at home together, under stress because of the pandemic and with little contact with other people outside the home.
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