The Development and Evaluation of a Statewide Training Center for Home Visitors and Supervisors

Coaching home visitors: A thematic review with an emphasis on research and practice needs

There is wide recognition in early childhood fields that coaching is important to a professional's development and growth in general, but little is known about coaching home visiting professionals in particular. An early childhood home visiting professional works with families to encourage positive parent-child interactions, family goal setting, and family well-being and health. Determining the essential components of coaching home visitors will help advance this field. Because coaching in the home visiting field is emergent, this article draws on literature from the early childhood field with an emphasis on applications for home visiting. We gleaned six themes that may represent common features of coaching. This article presents a compilation of common themes identified in literature reviews on coaching professionals across the early childhood field that warrant further development and evaluation by home visiting practitioners and researchers regardless of the home visiting model. The discussion concludes with recommendations to stimulate research and practice on coaching home visitors.

Contributions of Preventive Social Services in Early Childhood Home Visiting in a Disadvantaged Area of Sweden: The Practice of the Parental Advisor

Early childhood home visiting to improve health and development is commonly delivered by child health care (CHC) whereas home visitors from the social services are rare. We applied a constructivist grounded theory approach to explore the practice and contributions of parental advisors from the preventive social services in a home visiting collaboration with CHC in a socioeconomically disadvantaged area of Sweden. The analysis rendered a conceptual model of a situation-based practice, built on interactive encounters between parents and professionals. It includes strengthening of positive parenting, connecting parents to additional services, early detection of needs and provision of psychosocial support in accordance with each family's specific situation. Rooted in the training and experience in social work, the practice can be seen as contributory to the delivery of complex support to families through home visiting and could provide input to efforts of improving training of home visitors in different contexts.

New Perspectives on the Child- and Youth-Serving Workforce in Low-Resource Communities: Fostering Best Practices and Professional Development

The professionals and paraprofessionals who work daily with youth in low-resource, marginalized communities are integral to youth wellbeing; yet, their professional development, and the factors that promote it, are not well understood. In this introduction to the special issue, Understanding and Strengthening the Child- and Youth-Serving Workforce in Low-Resource Communities, we focus on understudied practitioners operating in an array of sectors and settings, such as home visitors, mental health paraprofessionals, early childhood assistant teachers, teachers in low-income countries, school resource officers, juvenile justice staff, and after-school and community-based program workers. We put forward a conceptual model detailing the interactive, layered set of proximal-to-distal ecological factors that influence the practice and professional development of these workers, and show how papers in the current issue address these layers in their examination of workforce development. We conclude with a summary of the contributions and lessons from this work - including the value of a whole-person approach, the importance of sharing process across research stages, and the need to build on the foundation provided by community psychology and implementation science - toward the twin goals of understanding and building the skills and strengths of the workforce, and ultimately, enhancing youth development.

Strengthening the Child- and Youth-Serving Workforce: Surveying the Landscape, Overcoming Challenges

This special issue addresses a neglected but important topic in our field: strengthening the child- and youth-serving workforce. Investing in this workforce should be a national priority because considerable evidence has shown that investments in early childhood education and development, particularly in low-resource contexts, that are reinforced through skills-based programs in adolescence and adulthood, have beneficial impacts throughout life. Investing in quality child- and youth-serving programs also has the additional benefit of creating a productive and capable future workforce. The editors and authors of the special issue should be commended for producing the first special issue on this topic in our field or in related fields, one that is long overdue. Articles in this issue survey the landscape of an amorphous and complex area of practice and research and describe key challenges for the field. In this commentary, I offer organizing frameworks to characterize the child- and youth-serving workforce, note emerging issues when addressing specific challenges, and identify areas for future research.