First 5 Valley is using a Community Impact Grant for the project Advancing the Help Me Grow Model with Family-engaged Developmental Modeling. The project’s goal is to improve early childhood health, development and family-level outcomes by expanding the national evidence-based Help Me Grow (HMG) model – a family-engaged developmental screening system of community resources – within underserved rural and urban Wisconsin communities. The project will support 9000 families with young children, prenatal-five, who might experience health disparities and inequities.
The Challenge
Many Wisconsin families experience health disparities influenced by economic hardships, access to health care and other factors. Parental resilience is low as families navigate adversity, trauma and mental health challenges. In addition, following the global pandemic, concerns about the impact of COVID-19 on young children have increased, as reflected in the rising number of developmental screenings identifying risks for delays and adverse outcomes. Parents and childcare providers have voiced concern about lagging personal and social skills among young children in their care, as well as challenging behaviors that are contributing to higher expulsion rates.
Project Goals
The Help Me Grow (HMG) program has proven to be a strong predictor of positive child outcomes and has generated long-term benefits for families. Now, through this project, First 5 Fox Valley aims to go further by advancing the model and meaningfully engaging families in setting developmental goals – such as communication, social-emotional and motor skills – to support healthy developmental trajectory and monitor progress over time. By using the Family-engaged Developmental Monitoring (FEDM) framework, the project adopts an asset-based approach that recognizes what is going well and identifies family priorities for their children. The two goals of this project are to:
Utilize the Roadmap for Advancing Family-engaged Development Monitoring self-assessment tools as a data-informed approach to gauge community readiness to implement the Help Me Grow program.
Promote optimal development of all young children by increasing the usage of developmental screening tools.
