Samantha Howell and her family live in a small yellow house in Floyd. Children’s bikes and toys are in the back yard. There’s a gorgeous view of the mountains, and a small creek.
Howell’s two-year-old daughter, Evelyn, has just fallen asleep for her afternoon nap. Dolls and blocks are stacked neatly in the living room, and on the daybed is a soft, well-loved quilt. It’s in this space where Howell and her daughter have met with a parent educator and a nurse, once a month, the past two years.
“And so they have just been a godsend, really,” Howell said. “They come in, and you know sit with me and we go over different activities.”
The home visiting workers are employees at New River Community Action, and as part of the home visiting program they bring games and art projects Howell can do with her daughter, to build their bond, and help her daughter learn.
“So it’s been really neat, they’ve seen her grow and mature into what she is now,” Howell said. Her daughter is about to go into preschool.
Home visiting programs exist through multiple community organizations across Virginia and work with nearly 7,000 families. Not everyone is low income, but many are.
But some rural communities, especially in southwest or southside Virginia, have little to no access to home visiting, said Laurel Aparicio, director of Early Impact Virginia.
“There are still a number of communities in the state, that have no services whatsoever,” Aparicio said.
Where home visiting is available, parents sometimes get to check in with nurses and counselors, right in their own home. And these workers don’t judge, Aparicio said. They’re more like parenting coaches.
“It’s having that person, that individual to connect with, who believes in you, who believes in your family, and is there for you unconditionally,” Aparicio said. “We all want that.”
She added that social isolation can be a struggle for any parent, because many live separated from extended families or close friends. “We are designed to live in community, to parent in community,” Aparicio said. “It’s not meant to be an individual experience. And home visiting can just be one of those places to help.”
In a recent study conducted by Early Impact Virginia, parents talked about how checking in with their home visitor helps them handle daily stress or anxiety.
For Ashley Walker in Abingdon, a mother who for the past five years has been receiving help with home visiting through an organization called People Incorporated, said the program meant her son got access to speech therapy, something she may not have learned about if she didn’t have a parent educator, someone she trusted, asking about her son’s development.
“She was able to tell me, ‘well Ashley maybe he is a couple words behind, maybe we do need a little help.’ And from there connected me to another program, that had my son able to carry a conversation with me fully in the next six months.”
For years, funding to support home visiting in Virginia came from a federal program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, also known as TANF. But in the last few years, that funding has decreased.
Virginia lawmakers included millions of dollars to their proposed state budget this year to pay for home visiting.
Each family’s situation is unique. Visits may include learning games, how to do crafts, and one of the most important things to help children develop: play with parents. Parent educator Danielle Fields recently taught one family how to turn a bar of soap into fake snow.
“They completely destroyed their living room, but they loved it!” Fields recalled. “You know, they were throwing the snow up in the ceiling fan, and it was going everywhere, and the kids were laying down on the carpet making snow angels out of, you know, fake snow that was in the floor.”
Fields said she tries to empower parents to focus on the importance of little things. Finding laughter, and joy. Because simple experiences, like coloring or making fake snow, helps families build resilience together.
To see if there is a home visiting program in your area, you can search this directory of programs across Virginia.
Danielle Fields’ fake snow recipe:
Take a bar of ivory soap and put it on a plate in the microwave for a minute to a minute and a half. You can watch the soap expand through the microwave window. Once it’s done, take the soap out and crumble it up and sprinkle it around. “It can be quite messy, but it also will make your home smell amazing,” said Fields. If you are concerned about the mess, you can set aside part of a room with a splash pad or garbage bags to put the soap snow on.
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
