Nurturing Families

Parents are their child’s first and most important teacher. The Nurturing Families initiative works to strengthen the parent-child bond – especially from birth to age 3 – by helping parents understand how brain development and social-emotional growth affect their children’s school readiness and later success and then providing them with the tools and resources to help them do the best job possible.

Nurturing Families focuses on three key elements: the parent-child relationship, parent-child interaction, and the creation of nurturing and enriching home environments that support all areas of a child’s healthy development. All of these elements lay the foundation for language development and early literacy and connect directly to school readiness.

Nurturing Families is designed to:

  • build and strengthen the capacity of providers, educators and community-based organizations that offer home visiting services;
  • and provide guidance, instruction and resources to parent educators

Through Nurturing Families, Thrive connects parent educators and family support programs with training and professional development opportunities to increase the quality of parenting education and programs at the community level.  A key element of this initiative is to reach low-income parents of color across our state. To do this in a high quality and effective manner, practitioners must be supported in understanding racial equity and the delivery of culturally relevant services. To accomplish this, Thrive supported the development of Communities of Practice.

To initiate work around supporting parent educators in the Puget Sound region, Thrive supported the creation of 14 Communities of Practice that, in 2010, reached over 100 parent educators in the area.

Communities of Practice support parent educators by providing opportunities to share information, learn from each other, learn from experts in the field and create strong networks in a field where practitioners often feel isolated. These communities will provide an opportunity for professional growth and development in a peer to peer environment.

Learn more about key elements of creating a nurturing and enriching environment at home in our research paper.