• Quality early care and education programs help children learn and develop important skills, while also enabling parents to work or attend school.
• Reading to a child promotes brain development. Giving a child time and full attention when reading them a story tells them they matter. It also builds self-esteem, and vocabulary, feeds imagination, and even improves their sleeping patterns.
• Empowering parents to be their child’s first teacher involves providing parents with knowledge and support to promote child development, parenting strategies, early detection of developmental delays, prevent child abuse, and increase school readiness.
Objective 5.1: Increase opportunities for quality parent-child interaction and activities.
Parent-child relationships form the basis for optimal attachment, bonding, and early development. While interventions by trained service providers and clinicians are necessary in certain situations, the parental role of teaching and advocating for their children is the most sustainable. Empowering parents to be their child’s first teacher involves providing parents with knowledge and supports to promote child development, parenting strategies, early detection of developmental delays, prevent child abuse, and increase school readiness.
The Ages and Stages Questionnaire (ASQ) is a user-friendly tool designed to assess children at critical developmental milestones. It is a parent-centric approach with inherent ease-of-use characteristics to assist parents in assessing their child’s developmental growth and signal the need for early intervention across the five domains: communication, gross motor, fine motor, problem solving, and social emotional.
