BY MORGAN REISS
The Help Me Grow National Center, in partnership with the Association of University Centers on Disabilities, is proud to announce the release of A Roadmap for Advancing Family-Engaged Developmental Monitoring (FEDM).
Family-engaged developmental monitoring is an intentional partnership of families and providers working to highlight a child’s developmental progress and identify opportunities for support and education to promote positive outcomes.
By engaging and elevating the role of families in the developmental monitoring process, families are centered as experts about their child and equal partners in the process. When providers practice FEDM, they intentionally establish a rapport with families that invites celebration of progress and conversations around families’ needs and concerns. The ongoing practice of FEDM extends the reach of providers, reinforces families as skilled and knowledgeable partners in their child’s development, and creates more opportunities for discussion around factors that impact child development. For the purpose of the Roadmap, the term provider reflects all those who serve and interact with young children, inclusive of medical, education, social service, community-based, faith-based, and many other child-serving sectors.
The three essential attributes of family-engaged developmental monitoring include:
• Families are regarded as the expert on their child’s development • Information is gathered to inform a holistic approach to the child’s development • Developmental progress and needs are discussed over time
In order to improve the early childhood system, we must improve how we measure our efforts, which first requires standardized definitions and understanding.
The Roadmap is a practical guide to building stronger shared language and a collective understanding of goals and possibilities for supporting child development, particularly around family-engaged developmental monitoring, which serves as one of the five key components of a new framework for children’s healthy development and family well-being.
To support practices, providers, and early childhood systems in strengthening this framework, the Roadmap includes self-assessment tools to determine individual, programmatic, and system-level alignment with family-engaged developmental monitoring efforts.
The Roadmap offers strategies that can be universally applied across sectors, as well as graphics to visualize family and provider strategies in the application of FEDM. Read the Roadmap to learn more about how family-engaged developmental monitoring can support developmental outcomes, promote early identification of developmental delays, be practiced across providers, advance equity, and discover strategies to improve how we partner with families to help their children thrive.
READ THE ROADMAP HERE
This is the second installment of a two-part blog series on this topic. To read the first installment, click here.
This effort was supported with funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (cooperative agreement 6 NU38OT000280-02-02).
Morgan Reiss is the Policy & Communications Specialist for the Help Me Grow National Center at the Office for Community Child Health at CT Children’s Medical Center.