April 27, 2017

If Trump’s Serious About Championing Women and Families, He Should Start by Supporting Home Visiting

By Bellwether

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In celebration of NAEYC’s “The Week of the Young Child” April 24 – 28, Bellwether looks at programs that improve the lives of young children.


Earlier this week, Ivanka Trump got boos and jeers in Berlin when she called President Trump a “champion for supporting families” and an “empowerer” of women. This has been her line since the campaign trail, often accompanied by a deeply flawed child care plan.
If Ivanka wants to start making those talking points a reality, and maybe even get cheers from the early childhood community, she should talk to her father about home visiting programs.
In these programs, pregnant women and families with young children at-risk of poverty or other factors receive regular at-home visits designed to encourage healthy parenting, support maternal health and child development, and connect families with other services. Home visiting is growing, but currently these programs reach only about 5 percent of the over 3 million American infants and toddlers living in poverty.
Supporting home visiting programs sounds like something everyone can agree on, right? So why are they missing from Trump’s budget proposal and Ivanka’s “women and children” speeches?
On one hand, it is hard to imagine President Trump supporting any program that was a cornerstone of Hillary Clinton’s campaign promises in early childhood, not to mention the fact that federal home visiting grants were originally created as part of the Affordable Care Act. On the other hand, with a solid evidence base across multiple program models and geographies, home visiting has garnered praise and support from both sides of the aisle in recent House hearings and Senate briefings, and it’s the kind of cost-efficient preventative program that can save money in the long term.
While home visiting programs like these have been around for decades, when the federal Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting grant program (MIECHV) was established in 2010, it helped spread home visiting across the country. There are 18 home visiting models that meet federal evidence standards, and most of these allow for lots of variation, so home visiting programs can take many forms on the ground. Here are two examples:

  • Last summer, my Bellwether colleague Marnie Kaplan described the HIPPY program  after Hillary Clinton touted it. HIPPY focuses on preschool-aged children, and offers families training and materials to support early literacy and language development in weekly home visits.
  • Another highly-rated program is Healthy Families America (HFA), which primarily serves families with infants (birth to 12 months), and focuses on preventing child abuse and neglect by encouraging nurturing parent-child relationships. Home visitors screen for child development and family risk factors, teach families about child development, promote health and nutrition, and help parents develop positive knowledge, skills, and attitudes towards parenting.

Home visiting programs are not a replacement for more intensive early care and education programs, like Head Start, but they can provide important supports for families in a cost-efficient and flexible way. Part of the beauty of home visiting programs is that they are locally-run and administered, and are flexible to a variety of community contexts — for example, training home visitors within rural communities can create jobs, ensure community-responsive services, and reach more people than a single brick-and-mortar social services site.
While the Trump administration has been quiet on these programs so far, hopefully the combination of strong evidence, local control, and cost-efficiency could protect programs from looming budget cuts, or even see them grow in the future. If Trump commits support and resources for programs that work for children and families, that could be something to applaud.

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