Supporting Parents’ Confidence to Pull Up a Chair at the Early Intervention/Early Childhood Special Education Table

Abstract

Grounded in the work of researchers such as Dunst, Trivette, and Deal (1988), the Division for Early Childhood of the Council for Exceptional Children's (DEC) Recommended Practices in the area of working with families provide guidance to EI/early childhood special education (ECSE) practitioners on how best to support families of young children who have, or are at-risk for, developmental delays or disabilities. These practices emphasize values and behaviors such as growing parent-professional partnerships, building on existing parent strengths, enhancing parent self-efficacy beliefs, and promoting active parent engagement in decision making, all with the goal of achieving a family's self-identified goals. Related research suggests that implementation of family-centered help-giving behaviors, which are both relational and participatory, enhances a family's confidence and competence in advocating for and obtaining formal and informal supports and resources to promote their child's learning and development, leading to positive child and family outcomes. The relational aspect of family-centered help giving is inclusive of behaviors and dispositions such as active listening and empathy. The participatory aspect of family-centered help giving includes actions such as joint development of goals based on family-identified needs and shared decision making. This article contains a series of vignettes that exemplify an autonomy-oriented approach to help giving. The vignettes highlight not only possible missteps and misconceptions that parents might encounter but also practitioner actions that support parents' competence and help them to gain confidence in taking their place at the EI/ECSE table. Following each vignette, connections are drawn to DEC's (2014) Recommended Practices and examples of practitioner behaviors and actions that enable families to assume the role of advocate are offered.