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Supporting the Paraprofessional Home Visitor

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Home Visitation Programs

Abstract

The expansion of home visiting programs for families of young children, both nationally and internationally, has placed increased focus on how to support the provider who actually delivers the services. Early childhood home visiting remains a service field that often relies on lay or paraprofessional home visitors. This chapter provides a brief overview of how paraprofessionals are used in home visiting programs and the issues that arise in their professional development and training. Special emphasis is placed on the way that many paraprofessional home visitors relate to families, particularly, with an orientation that is flexible in incorporating more personal qualities into their help-giving. This is an approach that has both strengths and challenges and it is important to recognize both.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In most cases I refer to the home visitor as female for convenience, but this does not have to be the case. There are male home visitors, but in my experience they are rare. I also sometimes refer to the parent as the mother, since most often the parent participating in a home visiting programs is the mother. Again, this does not have to be so. Fathers do participate in home visiting, and programs should make efforts to recruit fathers in greater numbers, a topic that deserves greater attention than can be provided here (see, for example, Raikes & Bellotti, 2006).

  2. 2.

    Developmental pediatrics is a subspecialty that does provide more extensive training in child development, but makes up a relatively small percentage of the pediatric workforce in the USA.

  3. 3.

    Unlike the other two studies, I was not able to interview the families of the mental health therapists. The results from these interviews with the therapists have not been published, but were the focus of a doctoral dissertation by Bonnie Schwartz (2005).

  4. 4.

    Many of the quotes used in this chapter have been the focus of previous articles (Korfmacher, 2001; 2007; Korfmacher & Marchi, 2002; Humphries and Korfmacher, 2012).

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Acknowledgments

The studies noted in this chapter were funded by grants from the Spencer Foundation, the US Maternal and Child Health Bureau, and the Irving B. Harris Foundation.

Thank you to Isabela Marchi, Marisha Humphries, and Bonnie Schwartz for their assistance in collecting, transcribing, coding, and analyzing the data across the three studies.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Erikson Institute, Chicago, IL, USA

    Jon Korfmacher PhD

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  1. Jon Korfmacher PhD
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Correspondence to Jon Korfmacher PhD .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. Family, Consumer and Human Development, Utah State University, Logan, Utah, USA

    Lori Roggman

  2. Center for the Study of Violence, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil

    Nancy Cardia

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Korfmacher, J. (2016). Supporting the Paraprofessional Home Visitor. In: Roggman, L., Cardia, N. (eds) Home Visitation Programs. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17984-1_6

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