This essay was adapted from an article published on Medium.
About nine months ago, Dara told me she was interested in bringing her mother and nephew from Syria to the United States and needed help. She had immigrated to Evanston, Illinois, from Syria five years ago with her husband and five children and was looking to reunite with her family.
I wanted to help, but I had no idea where to start. As a home visitor for the federally funded Head Start/Early Head Start program, my goal is to help families create and achieve goals related to raising their young children. I work with Dara’s 4-year-old daughter, Naya, but I support her entire family. (I have changed their names in this essay to protect their privacy, and they have agreed to have their story shared.) As a home visitor, I provide resources, connection, and experiences to her family and the other families I serve.
Over the years, in addition to providing lessons and activities for the children I work with, I have helped families access food and diapers, complete school enrollment forms, and secure affordable housing, but this was a new request for me.
I decided to start by doing some research on the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services website. I learned a little about the process, then printed out the necessary documents and contacted my organization’s Arabic interpreter for help with translation.
Dara needed to complete a I-730, Petition for Refugee or Asylee Relative I looked at the form myself, and even though I'm a native English speaker, I felt overwhelmed. I knew Dara was even more disoriented. We worked for months to gather the information she needed. A few weeks ago, when we finally finished the lengthy document, I handed Dara two huge envelopes and explained that she would have to take them to the post office, weigh them for postage, and send them off.
“I don’t know how to do that,” he told me.
Dara had never been to a U.S. Post Office. We decided that we would plan a trip together, along with her children, so they could learn about the experience of sending mail. I prepared them as best I could by telling them what we would encounter. I couldn’t anticipate everything, but that conversation helped set us up for success. On the day of the trip, Dara and her children shared a new experience, one that helped them all grow. It takes a lot of courage to step out of your comfort zone, and the best part was that her children were there to watch their mother try something new while advocating for her family.
I have been a preschool educator for 25 years. During that time, I have been a teacher, a preschool owner and director, and now a home visitor. My professional experience in the early childhood field has given me an understanding of the critical nature of this work. So does my personal experience as a mother who went through a difficult time of motherhood, nursing a colicky baby and adjusting to the reality that maternity leave reduced our family's income. Looking back, I would have loved the reassurance and support of a home visitor.
How Home Visiting Programs Help Families
Through my work as a home visitor, I serve 11 children and their families, including Naya's. All of these families speak a language other than English in their home, and eight of the families are immigrants to the U.S. During my weekly visits to each family, I provide parents with resources as well as opportunities to learn and practice skills that will help their young children thrive. The idea is that parents and caregivers are a child's first teachers, and I support them in being the best teachers they can be. Participation in home visiting programs can help parents and caregivers learn to understand and develop their own skills. supporting families with health and wellness, and in my experience, these programs are especially effective with immigrant families.
During my visits, I bring developmentally appropriate lessons to Naya, who is fluent in Arabic and English. Like many children learning two languages, she is a little behind in learning letter names and numbers, but as I have assured many parents, being bilingual is very important. beneficial for brain developmentand will catch up with their monolingual peers.
Over the past year, in addition to bringing these activities to Naya and moving forward with travel documents, I have helped Dara and her family make a lot of progress on other goals. Working with one of our partner resource groups, the family of seven was able to secure new housing, moving from a two-bedroom apartment to a five-bedroom home. Once they moved, I was able to help Dara enroll her older children in a new school system. The process was almost as difficult as completing the I-730 form, but together we got through it.
Every family has its own goals and needs, so my work differs depending on who I support. Sometimes, I educate parents about child development and safety; other times, I provide resources for interacting with their children. And in some cases, I help them navigate the challenges they face as a family, whether it's finding emergency funds when their SNAP benefits are delayed, learning a new bus route to school, or, most recently, visiting the post office.
Expanding access is key
Investigation Investing in early childhood education has been shown to have significant benefits for children and families. And there is evidence that home visiting programs are invaluable to parents like Dara. Yet these programs are consistently underfunded and understaffed. The impact that home visiting has on a child’s development and a family’s well-being is enormous, but access is limited. There is not enough funding to make it available to all children who need it and are eligible to receive it.
We can increase access for children and their families by developing greater awareness of the benefits these programs offer to children, families, and society. We can advocate for increased federal funding and ongoing funding to allow every family who wants to benefit from this service to have immediate access, rather than being placed on a waiting list, which can last for years.
In line with family empowerment, a solution was suggested during a meeting: focus group I recently participated in a home visiting program in Illinois. The idea was to create a pathway for parents participating in home visiting programs to receive training in child development, goal setting, and documentation skills, so that they could become home visitors themselves. This type of approach would require oversight, support, and funding, but it is something that could boost the well-being of the original family by providing training, improving financial stability, and increasing connections throughout the community—and it could exponentially help others.
Imagine Dara guiding people through the process of registering children for school or taking them to the post office. Would she need some kind of guidance and support to do this? Of course we all do. But she would offer families, especially those who are new to this country, her invaluable experience, and bring them closer to their own personal goals.
