Domain 6 of 8
Classroom and Home-Focused Consultation
Key points
- Promotes warm, secure, and equitable relationships and interactions that shape classroom and home climates.
- Supports families and staff in understanding development, and in providing consistent routines and culturally responsive practices.
- Helps integrate mental health principles into daily routines, and addresses how bias affects the interpretation of young children's behavior, especially for marginalized communities.
Collaborates with caregivers and program staff to promote equitable, warm, and trusting relationships, consistent routines, and development-enhancing interactions that positively impact classroom and home climates.
Understands and values the roles culture and language play in supporting infants’ and young children’s social and emotional development, and incorporates family’s culture and primary language into classrooms and homes to build continuity in the learning experiences for infants and young children between the classroom and home.
Takes time to understand how race/ethnicity, primary language, and abilities influence the family’s experiences and the classroom’s and system’s role in oppressing or supporting wellness.
Resists applying a deficit-based perspective to infants, young children, and families who are from historically marginalized and oppressed communities by committing to learning about authentic community strengths and adaptive responses to poverty, historical trauma, and other racialized experiences.
6A Promotes Secure and Supportive Relationships Between Infants and Young Children and Adults that Respect the Cultures, Languages, and Abilities of Each Family
Core Skills
- 6A.1
- Helps families and staff deepen their understanding of how the quality of adult-infant/young child relationships impacts the way that infants and young children experience themselves in various settings, learn expectations, and understand how to interact and get along with others.
- 6A.2
- Helps families and staff understand and use (or, in the case of HV staff, support families in using) the power of positive relationships and adult-infant/young child interactions to support growth and development.
- 6A.3
- Offers insight into the role of positive sibling, peer, and group interactions in promoting infants’ and young children’s growth and well-being. Supports families and staff in promoting, fostering, and/or engaging in such interactions. Suggests, as needed, a range of strategies that honor varying cultural perspectives, and promotes successful give-and-take with peers.
- 6A.4
- Supports the development of and addresses impediments to positive relationships between (1) families and program staff, (2) program team members, (3) early childhood professionals, such as ECE teachers, early childhood providers, ECE administrators, HV staff and their peers and supervisors, and child welfare workers and supervisors.
6B Supports Families and Staff in Understanding the Nature of Development and Possibilities for Developmental Support
Core Skills
- 6B.1
- Shares information about how infants and young children learn and develop and the role that culture plays in their developmental and learning in a way that families and staff can understand, embrace, and use.
- 6B.2
- Fosters families’ and staff’s abilities to promote and facilitate the development of infants’ and young children’s relational capacities and social and emotional learning, including their capacities for connection, self-regulation,
6C Supports Families and Staff in Providing or Encouraging Consistent Routines and Developmentally Appropriate and Culturally Responsive Interactions and Practices
Core Skills
- 6C.1
- Supports families and staff in initiating, modifying, and/or supporting routines to promote safety and consistency in developmentally appropriate and culturally meaningful ways.
- 6C.2
- Collaborates with families to promote practices and interactions that respect and respond to their cultural values and beliefs and are responsive to the needs of individual infants and young children and groups of infants and young children.
- 6C.3
- Helps staff understand the impact of societal biases and prejudices on one’s own interpretation of infants’ and young children’s interactions and behaviors (especially with infants and young children from historically marginalized and oppressed communities).
6D Fosters a Deepened Understanding of Mental Health Issues and Related Interventions
Core Skills
- 6D.1
- Assists programs or other settings and providers in selecting, suggesting, and/or implementing observation strategies, tools, assessments, and recording techniques to gain insight into the functioning and social and emotional climate of homes or classrooms, and help identify and eliminate potential disparities by race/ethnicity, primary language, culture, abilities, disposition, and life circumstances.
- 6D.2
- Helps families and providers integrate ideas, activities, and resources that infuse mental health principles into the daily routines and interactions of a particular home or classroom that respect and respond to families’ culture, language, and values.
- 6D.3
- Helps providers understand mental health, trauma, and healing in the context of historical, racialized trauma.
Source: Competency text is reproduced from Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health Consultation: Competencies, Center of Excellence for Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health Consultation (2020 edition).
