How to improve Indoor Air Pollution

When people burn wood, dung, coal, charcoal, gas, and crop wastes indoors for cooking or heating without good ventilation, smoke fills the house. This smoke contains harmful gases (fumes) and tiny particulates (soot) that cause breathing problems and other illnesses. Headaches, dizziness, and fatigue are often followed by serious illnesses such as asthma, pneumonia, bronchitis, or lung cancer. Indoor air pollution from smoking fires also increases the risk of getting TB. Women and children are the most exposed to harmful cooking smoke. When pregnant women are exposed to a lot of smoke every day, it can cause their children to be born very small, grow slowly, and have difficulty learning later on. In some cases, it can even cause children to be born dead.

To reduce indoor air pollution, you can:

• improve ventilation
• improve stoves
• use cleaner fuels
• use safer cleaning products
• reduce air pollution from outdoors

Poor ventilation harms health: Ventilation is the way fresh air moves into a room or building, and how old and polluted air moves out. If a house has poor ventilation, smoke and polluted air stay inside. Poor ventilation also traps moisture in the house, causing dampness and mold. The easiest way to reduce indoor air pollution is to improve ventilation. To know if your house has poor ventilation, look for these signs:

• Smoke stays in the house, or the ceilings are black from cooking or heating smoke.
• Moisture collects on windows or walls.
• Clothing, bedding, or walls grow mold.
• Bad smells from toilets or sewers stay in the house.

If you cook with gas and often suffer from dizziness and confusion, this may be a sign of poor ventilation or a gas leak.

What are the Healthy Home

The ideal home is not just a building for shelter. A home should be a place cold, rain and sun, wind, pests, disasters such as floods and earthquakes, and pollution and disease. Unfortunately, many people’s living conditions do not protect their health.  Poor living conditions may even cause illness, or make health problems worse. Whether people live close together or spread apart, poor housing, indoor air pollution, pests, and toxic chemicals in household products can cause many illnesses.

As more people move from rural areas into cities and towns, the way people live and maintain their homes changes, often for the worse. People who spend a lot of time in the home, such as children, the elderly and disabled, and people with long-term health problems such as HIV, suffer the most.

How to improve living conditions by making homes safer and more comfortable depends on local traditions, available materials, and climate. Unfortunately, it also depends on income and ownership. People who rent their homes often have little control over their living conditions and must depend on their landlords to make improvements. People in shantytowns, marginal communities, or other “temporary” settlements (which too often become permanent) live in homes that rarely provide security or comfort. But whether a person owns, rents, or lives in makeshift housing, working with neighbors is the most effective way to improve living conditions in the whole neighborhood.

Health Problems at Home: Our homes are not separate from the environment. They can have many of the same environmental health problems we find in our communities and workplaces. When planning a new home or improving the home you live in, you can protect your health by considering problems caused by how and where houses are built, how they are furnished, and what work is done at home.

What Can I Expect From My Supervisor?

The Home-Based Supervisor’s Manual for the Head Start Home-Based Program Option includes detailed descriptions of the role of the home-based supervisor and strategies that supervisors can use to support the work you do with families. Familiarize yourself with the information in the Supervisor’s Manual so you can talk with your supervisor about the kind of support that would be most helpful to you.

The home-based supervisor has many roles and responsibilities in your program. As a mentor, he or she supports you in your work by doing the following:

Modeling—Your supervisor should be able to demonstrate the skills you are learning as a home visitor. He or she shows you how to have respectful, trusting relationships with others as you observe him or her interacting with families and staff members.

Teaching—Your supervisor shares his or her expertise about the Head Start program, child and family development, and home visiting as a strategy for delivering services. He or she teaches you in many different ways: discussion, reading assignments, in-service training, anecdotes, modeling, or formal instruction.

Planning—Your supervisor contributes to the design and continuous improvement of the home-based program. You share your experiences, successes, and challenges with your supervisor so he or she can use those experiences to inform planning and improve the program.

Leading—Your supervisor sets the tone for how you interact with families and with other staff members. He or she is responsible for team-building efforts that help you feel supported by a network of colleagues working together to realize the goals of the program. As a leader, your supervisor provides an example for how to negotiate the challenges of your job.

Advocating—Your supervisor advocates for you and for the needs of the families with whom you work. He or she is your support person—the one you can turn to when you are struggling. He or she works with the program leadership to advocate for the resources you need to work effectively with families.

Assessing—Your supervisor shares in the responsibility for the quality of the home-based services your agency provides. He or she assesses your job performance and supports you in your professional growth. Your supervisor plays a role in program self-assessment and monitoring to ensure that your home-based program offers high quality services.

What are the Differences between Socializations for Preschoolers and Socializations for Infants?

The purpose of these socialization activities for the children is to emphasize peer group interaction though age-appropriate activities in a Head Start classroom, community facility, home, or on a field trip. The children are to be supervised by the home visitor with parents observing at times and actively participating at other times. The Head Start Bureau Information Memorandum titled Child Development Services during Home Visits and Socializations for the Early Head Start Home-Based Program Option clarifies the purpose of socializations for infants and toddlers. Socialization experiences for infants and toddlers are designed differently than socializations for preschoolers.

The purpose of socialization experiences for infants and toddlers is to support child development by strengthening the parent-child relationship. The content of the group experience reflects this emphasis and incorporates the goals of the program and participating families such as: helping parents to better understand child development; encouraging parents to share their parenting challenges and joys with one another; providing activities for parents and children to enjoy together; offering structured and unstructured learning opportunities for both children and parents; and modeling successful strategies for engaging children and supporting their development.

Infants and toddlers are only beginning to build their first and most important relationships: the relationships with their parents. Socialization experiences focus on the parent-child relationship as the foundation from which children will then be able to develop close, trusting, and respectful relationships with peers and other adults as they grow.

In contrast, socialization experiences for preschoolers provide opportunities for peer group interaction because 3-to-5-year-old children are at a developmental stage where they are beginning to form deeper relationships with their peers and where the peer group is beginning to have a greater influence in their lives. The group setting provides opportunities for parents and staff members to learn how children act in a group. The importance and influence of peer relationships grow as children enter preschool and, later, the elementary school environment. The socialization experiences for preschoolers provide a supportive place in which they can practice skills in taking on leadership, developing friendships, and negotiating conflict. Integrating the Goals of Home Visits into Socialization Experiences

Socialization experiences offer additional opportunities to work on the goals you have established with families during your home visits. Socializations should build on the activities and topics you address in the home. For example, if you have a number of families working on early literacy skills with their children, you might develop a number of experiences on this topic.  

socialization experience for infants or toddlers could include time for parents and children to choose and read board books together; activities involving listening to audiotapes of children’s songs and demonstrating finger plays for parents and children to do together (e.g., The Itsy Bitsy Spider or The Wheels on the Bus); or a field trip to a local library to participate in a parent-infant story time. You can develop a socialization on pre-literacy skills for preschoolers that includes an activity for parents and children to make a book together with pictures from magazines or the child’s drawings; a dramatic play around a favorite story; or various activities built around the theme “the letter of the day.” For example, if the letter of the day is B, then plan activities that begin with B (balls, block building, or bubble blowing) and serve snacks that begin with B (bananas, bean salad, broccoli, and blueberry yogurt). Be creative and have fun! Many of the above examples are activities that the parents can recreate at home. You play an important role in linking the socialization experiences and the home visits so parents understand how both aspects of the home-based program work together to help them reach their goals.

Parents benefit from socialization experiences in a number of ways: by observing how other parents and staff members interact with their children; by participating in facilitated discussions on a particular topic related to the socialization; or by conversing informally with other parents or staff members as they interact with their children. However, socialization groups are not the time to conduct formal parenting education classes. More structured parenting education that focuses exclusively on the adult learner should have its own designated time. Reserve the socialization time for experiences that include both the parents and their children as a special time for them to be together, enjoy one another, and learn with others who share common interests and goals. You play an active role in the socialization experience because your relationship is the most powerful tool you have to provide families with the support they need to reach their goals. As part of your ongoing family partnership agreement process, you must build in specific roles for parents in home visits and socializations. These roles provide a way to involve parents in all aspects of socializations, including planning them, carrying them out, and evaluating them. Parent participation ensures that the goals and experiences of socializations are culturally sensitive and relevant to participating families. Parents help you to individualize the curriculum for their particular child.

Socialization experiences are an ideal time to use observation as a tool for parent education. Child observation is a skill that parents and staff members can use to learn about child development, identify individual differences, and create meaningful learning experiences for children. During socialization experiences, you can help parents hone their observation skills by together watching their children at play and noticing aloud what their child’s interests, skills, habits, and preferences are. For example, as you sit on the floor with a parent and his 8-month-old, you might notice, “She sure lets you know she wants that ball. Look how she’s trying to crawl over the pillow to get it.” Or you might ask, “Does she always turn her head away and fuss like that when she’s had enough food?” With the parents of a preschooler, you might observe how imaginatively he or she uses the large cardboard boxes to create “houses” to hide in and “cars” to drive. Or you might reflect on how a preschooler is trying to join in a group of peers: “It looks like Brian really wants to play trains with those kids but he’s not quite sure how to get in on the action.” As you observe and reflect on the child’s behavior, you are teaching parents about reading their child’s cues. You can then build on those insights to foster parent-child interactions that best support the child’s development and learning.

Your agency may have a designated staff person to plan and carry out the socializations. This staffing pattern enables the person in this role to devote focused time to coordinating, planning, and carrying out the group experience. Ideally, this staff person would be an individual with expertise in both child development and in leading activity groups for parents and children together. However, even if a designated staff person manages the socializations, you still play an active role to collaborate with that person because you are the one who has the strongest relationship with the families in your home-based program. You are the one who is consistently available to the families, who is trusted, and with whom the families are most comfortable.

Group socializations provide you with new perspectives on your work with families as you interact with parents and children outside of the home environment. Group experiences, when conducted in collaboration with your colleagues, also provide you with the support of fellow staff members as you share insights into family strengths and challenges. You should have enough time in your work schedule to fully participate in socializations. If you find that your schedule does not give you the time you need, talk with your supervisor to make the adjustments necessary for your full participation in this important aspect of the home-based program. You determine the size and composition of your group socializations based on child and family needs and goals. First, identify families who are working on similar goals and who could benefit from a socialization experience on a common theme. The socialization experiences should be meaningful for the families and relevant to the goals you are working on in the home.

Next, consider the individual needs of the children. Individual temperaments, learning styles, or other special considerations may indicate a smaller and more intimate setting to optimize the children’s comfort and ability to interact. Groups of infants and toddlers should be small to enable the trust, predictability, and responsive caregiving that very young children need. In some cases, you might group your socialization experiences according to developmental level—young infants, mobile infants, toddlers, or preschoolers—and in other circumstances, you might prefer a mixed age group. Each grouping has different advantages. Separate age groups may be easier to plan for and facilitate, and they may allow parents to socialize with other parents who have the common bond of raising a child who is at a similar stage of development. Mixed age groups allow parents with more than one child to participate in a single socialization that involves all the siblings. They also provide older children an opportunity to be a leader, teacher, or helper with younger peers. Younger children learn from their older peers as the older children model self-help skills or new ways to play with objects.

The setting of your socialization experiences should be developmentally appropriate and should support the goals of your socializations. You should have a designated space for your socializations so families have a predictable, stable, and safe environment. This space should have adequate facilities for diapering and toileting, hand-washing, food refrigeration, and temperature control. You must make sure that the setting is accessible to children with disabilities so they can actively engage with others and fully participate in the activities. The setting you choose should be comfortable for both children and adults. For example, you can provide comfortable seating for adults that also promotes parent-child interaction. You might place portable stools around a child-size table for the adults to sit next to their children. Offer adult-size chairs that can easily be moved around the room or places such as a hammock or rocking chair where a parent and child could snuggle together. Young infants need safe places to lie down; newly mobile infants need space to crawl and pull themselves up to stand; and toddlers and preschoolers need large spaces for climbing, running, and tumbling.

Socializations are a time for fun, learning, and support. In addition to the structured learning that takes place, they provide informal “teachable moments” that offer rich, responsive, and relevant learning experiences in unplanned and often unexpected ways. These are the learning experiences that usually have the greatest effect. Recognize how the unique qualities of the socialization experience strengthen and enrich the work you do in

What is the Purpose of Socialization Experiences in a Home-Based Program

Socialization experiences provide families and staff members with special opportunities to support child development and learning. Socializations build on the experiences and goals that are addressed during home visits as well as attend to the needs of both children and parents. The group experience is a valuable strategy for delivering services because it provides parents with the opportunity to obtain feedback from staff members and other parents about their children’s activities, strengths, and resources; to observe their children (when age appropriate) interacting with other children and adults; and to share and learn with others about the challenges and joys of parenting.

Socialization experiences incorporate all of the services required by the Program Performance Standards. For example, you can develop socialization experiences around topics related to medical, dental, mental health, nutrition, or child development and education issues. Families are involved in all aspects of socialization experiences, including planning, implementing, and evaluating. Community partners might be involved in socialization experiences as guest speakers, or they might provide space or other resources for socialization experiences. Finally, in keeping with the Performance Standards, socialization groups require effective management systems such as planning, record keeping, and self-assessment.

Socializations are individualized to address the developmental level of each participating child and the goals, needs, and resources of each family. The goals and outcomes for socialization experiences vary depending on the developmental level of the child and will change as a child’s development progresses. Socialization experiences and home visits are based on a curriculum that:

 Articulates goals for children and parents;

• identifies the experiences through which they will achieve these goals;
• determines appropriate roles for staff members and parent
• provides the necessary materials to carry out the plan;
• includes all areas of child development—cognitive, motor, language, social, emotional; and
• considers each child’s cultural, ethnic, and linguistic heritage and experience.

What We Can Do? - Your Role as a Home Based Visitor

What do you actually do on a home visit? Are you supposed to greet a family in a certain way? Do you fill out particular forms? Are you expected to say or do specific things? In reality, no two home visits look exactly alike. You bring your own temperament, personality, beliefs, and values to any role you have. Each family similarly comprises its own personalities, history of relationships, and cultural and familial values. Your relationship with each family is influenced by this rich past and is further colored by current circumstances—including variables such as how confident you feel in your job, the amount of support you receive from your agency, and your own personal life circumstances. Families are also influenced by their current situations—job stability, financial concerns, housing, or the quality of their relationships with others. Given this complexity, we can offer no simple answer to the question what do you do on a home visit? However, the following three principles provide a framework for how you can approach each home visit, despite the great variability in the families with whom you work. Each of the next three points will be discussed further in the following sections.

You are in the home to support child development, the overall goal of the Head Start program. Thus, one of the first tasks you must accomplish with each family is to identify that family’s child development goals. Your challenge is to ensure that each home visit maintains a focus on those goals. Your program’s approach to curriculum helps you to meet goals for children’s development and learning by providing experiences to meet those goals, by identifying the roles of staff members and parents, and by identifying the necessary materials and equipment.

You recognize parents as their children’s first and most important teachers. You support parents so they can best support their children. You provide comprehensive Head Start services to families because children do best when you attend to all areas of their development—physical, social, cognitive, and emotional. Similarly, parents are best able to provide the support their children need when their own needs for a healthy lifestyle are met—physical and emotional health, social support, adult education or job skills, financial stability, and safe housing.

You capitalize on the learning opportunities in the home environment. The home-based program is effective in fostering healthy development because you use the setting in which children and families spend the majority of their time. You emphasize how everyday routines provide meaningful opportunities for children to build on their developmental skills. You help parents understand how simple household items and experiences captivate children’s imagination and promote learning. For example, literacy experiences occur as parents talk and sing with their children, as they follow a recipe during a cooking activity, or as they name objects in the grocery store. You also support and empower parents to recreate and build on these learning experiences for their children during the time between home visits. These repeated experiences have a significant influence on learning and development, helping children to gain the motivation and curiosity to learn as well as the specific language, literacy, and numeric skills essential for success later in school.

Developmental Screening, Ongoing Assessment, and Curriculum Planning: One of your first tasks with a family is to conduct a developmental screening (within 45 days of entry into the program) to identify any concerns about a child’s developmental functioning. The screening process helps you decide whether developmental skills are progressing as expected or whether certain concerns indicate the need for further evaluation. An important point to remember is that the screening process does not lead to a decision about whether or not a child has a developmental delay. Developmental screening is, by definition, a process to determine whether further evaluation is necessary. The screening process begins during the enrollment period as you build partnerships with families and initiate Head Start services. Screening requires more than filling out a formal tool such as a checklist or form. Developmental screening involves observing the child as well as learning from parents and other significant caregivers about the child’s development and behavior.

Parents take an active role in the developmental screening, ongoing assessment, and evaluation of their children. Parents know their children best. They can tell you how their children typically act, the skills their children have, and their children’s likes and dislikes. They are also the ones with whom their children are most at ease and will therefore act more naturally, demonstrating their true abilities. The results of the screening and ongoing assessment are used to inform your goal setting with families and to track progress over time. If you discover a concern about a child’s development, the next step is to get a more in-depth evaluation from your local early intervention program. For infants and toddlers under the age of 3 years, contact your Part C. For preschoolers ages 3–5 years, contact the Preschool Grants program.  Ideally, your Head Start program has strong collaborative relationships with these community providers that enable the referral and follow-up to occur in a timely and effective manner.

Things We Can Do to Build a Partnership with Community

Always remember that you are an invited guest in the families’ homes. The Family Partnership Agreement Process that families open their homes and allow us into their lives in such personal ways. The family partnership agreement is a process rather than a form. This process provides an opportunity to identify family. Think about the characteristics of trusting relationships in your own life and the qualities goals and how the families will achieve these goals. At the heart of the families that make them unique—the feeling of partnership agreement process is the individual pittance, being understood, and organization of Heart Start services having your needs met. These are the same qualities that you want to bring to your relationships with Individual families what makes partnership about feel agreements describe families and understood? Goals, perhaps it is how responsibilities, a person list-timetables, and strategies for achieving family goals you without judging, gives you another perspective from which to view things. These agreements also describe a family’s progress into achieving provides concrete help when you need it. Goals they set. In the home -based program option, Maybe it is his or her tone of voice, this agreement must include an empathy information just mentioned and the esthetic ear, or simply a hug when the person senses that you need it the most. Role of parents in home visits and group Consider socialization experiences [how your interactions with families convey those messages.

Give families the time they need to get comfortable with you, with the home visiting process, and with the way that you will work together. Each family you work with will move at a different pace. The first couple of home visits provide an opportunity to establish rapport—a way of being together that is comfortable, builds trust, and inspires honest communication. It is often wise to let the relationship develop during the first few home visits before you focus on specific issues such as the child’s developmental screening or the completion of required forms or other paperwork. Once you have established your relationship with the family, you are much more likely to have meaningful conversations about child and family needs, resources, strengths, and goals.

Familiarize yourself with principles of adult learning. Adults learn best when they are actively involved in the learning process. Parents decide their own goals for learning, share in the planning process, and are equal partners in decision making. By demonstrating respect and confidence in parents’ abilities, you help them discover their own solutions. Use a Parent’s Guide to the Head Start Home-Based Program as a tool to introduce families to your program. The Parent’s Guide includes three parts:

(1) Introducing Home-Based Programs, which describes what a home-based program is and what parents can expect;

(2) You and Your Home Visitor, which explores how families work with you to best support their child’s development; and

(3) Everyday Moments are Learning Moments, which offers ideas for how parents can help their children learn by using objects and materials in their home. You can use the Parent’s Guide to explain your home visiting program and how you and the family will work together. Use the space provided in the Parent’s Guide to personalize it with important information such as your name and contact number as well as the day and time of your home visits and socialization experiences.

Recognize that who you are as a person—your temperament, past experiences, family and cultural values, and current life circumstances—shape how you respond to the families in your program. Some families will “click” with you right away, and others might not feel like a good match. Talk openly with your supervisor about the reactions you have to the families with whom you work. There is no “right” or “wrong” way to feel. It is normal and expected that each family will elicit different kinds of feelings in you. Your supervisor can help you to better understand your own reactions to the families and can help you develop strategies that use this self-awareness to enrich your professional development. The family partnership agreement does not have to be a written document. The focus is on relationship-building, not on record keeping. You can creatively document the family partnership agreement process and keep track of how families are making progress toward their goals through activities such as journals, video or audiotape recordings, or written plans. Each family partnership agreement will be different because it is individualized to meet family needs and goals. Your job is to document the process in a way that is meaningful to you and the family and in a way that (a) demonstrates to others how you have thoughtfully engaged the family in this process and (b) allows you to effectively track change over time.