Aligned with DEC recommended practices and CEC standards! A must for future early interventionists.

The first three years of life play a crucial role in setting the stage for later adjustment and success. For children with disabilities, children at risk, and even for healthy infants and toddlers born into well-functioning families, support and early intervention can foster optimal growth and development. This concise and readable guide presents a developmentally sound framework for strengths-based intervention with parents and young children. The volume is filled with practical suggestions for building positive family relationships, cultivating parental knowledge and understanding of child development, and enhancing family support systems. Also featured is an extensive annotated bibliography that describes a wealth of additional resources for professionals and parents. Grounded in research and informed by wisdom from the field, this book provides essential knowledge and skills for professionals and students across a range of health care, social service, and educational disciplines.

This book provides a guide for planning, providing, and documenting effective early interventions for infants and toddlers and their families. It discusses best practices for engaging the family, team problem-solving, developing individual treatment plans, incorporating evidence-based interventions, tracking progress, and identifying and solving challenges and obstacles presenting during treatment. The book focuses on the approximately 13% of U.S. children under age 3 who have developmental delays/disabilities, many of which may impair their ability to talk, move, learn, socialize, and become independent. When delivered effectively, early intervention can improve daily function and outcomes for these children, many of whom present with multiple and unique challenges. Each chapter in this book is written to guide practitioners, clinicians, therapists, and related professionals in their daily work with young children and their families. It addresses everyday challenges, including creating routines for parents of infants and toddlers, teaching parents how to play with their children and respond to problem behaviors, and managing caregiver stress. Promoting Positive Behavioral Outcomes for Infants and Toddlers is an essential resource for scientist-practitioners/professionals and clinicians as well as researchers and graduate students in child and school psychology; educational psychology; behavioral therapy; infancy and early childhood development; speech pathology, and occupational therapy.

How we raise young children is one of today's most highly personalized and sharply politicized issues, in part because each of us can claim some level of "expertise." The debate has intensified as discoveries about our development-in the womb and in the first months and years-have reached the popular media. How can we use our burgeoning knowledge to assure the well-being of all young children, for their own sake as well as for the sake of our nation? Drawing from new findings, this book presents important conclusions about nature-versus-nurture, the impact of being born into a working family, the effect of politics on programs for children, the costs and benefits of intervention, and other issues. The committee issues a series of challenges to decision makers regarding the quality of child care, issues of racial and ethnic diversity, the integration of children's cognitive and emotional development, and more. Authoritative yet accessible, From Neurons to Neighborhoods presents the evidence about "brain wiring" and how kids learn to speak, think, and regulate their behavior. It examines the effect of the climate-family, child care, community-within which the child grows.

The goal of this book is to assist families and caregivers in the early intervention, care, and development of the toddler and to be instrumental in reaching the child's potential. By drawing attention to the ways in which some children with disabilities have been excluded from public education, these families and caregivers become aware of the importance of understanding the law, its content, and its implications. It is also important to be aware of the laws that have been tested through litigation. The author provides a comprehensive yet easily understandable background on these laws and includes basic insight into various examples. Main topics include: (1) Federal legislation and state compliance, child find and screening, evaluation, determination of eligibility, the IFSP, service delivery, and reimbursement of the early intervention process; (2) co-treatment and assisted intervention, counseling, limiting services, the efficacy of early intervention; (3) professional responses, consumer satisfaction, and knowledge of risk versus at-risk challenges; and (4) socioeconomic and cultural diversity and how professionals view each other as team members, including their comments. Personal experiences are provided which serve to make a point and/or bring levity to sometimes grave situations. These experiences contribute to the subjective opinions and research findings that promote the efficacy of early intervention. In addition, this book explores the benefits and success of animal assisted intervention. The primary audience for the book includes parents, educators, social workers, and others who work with toddlers who have special needs and challenges.

Decades of research have demonstrated that the parent-child dyad and the environment of the familyâ€"which includes all primary caregiversâ€"are at the foundation of children's well- being and healthy development. From birth, children are learning and rely on parents and the other caregivers in their lives to protect and care for them. The impact of parents may never be greater than during the earliest years of life, when a child's brain is rapidly developing and when nearly all of her or his experiences are created and shaped by parents and the family environment. Parents help children build and refine their knowledge and skills, charting a trajectory for their health and well-being during childhood and beyond. The experience of parenting also impacts parents themselves. For instance, parenting can enrich and give focus to parents' lives; generate stress or calm; and create any number of emotions, including feelings of happiness, sadness, fulfillment, and anger. Parenting of young children today takes place in the context of significant ongoing developments. These include: a rapidly growing body of science on early childhood, increases in funding for programs and services for families, changing demographics of the U.S. population, and greater diversity of family structure. Additionally, parenting is increasingly being shaped by technology and increased access to information about parenting. Parenting Matters identifies parenting knowledge, attitudes, and practices associated with positive developmental outcomes in children ages 0-8; universal/preventive and targeted strategies used in a variety of settings that have been effective with parents of young children and that support the identified knowledge, attitudes, and practices; and barriers to and facilitators for parents' use of practices that lead to healthy child outcomes as well as their participation in effective programs and services. This report makes recommendations directed at an array of stakeholders, for promoting the wide-scale adoption of effective programs and services for parents and on areas that warrant further research to inform policy and practice. It is meant to serve as a roadmap for the future of parenting policy, research, and practice in the United States.