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Baby Steps is a unique program that provides opportunities for children birth to 5 and their families to receive developmental screenings, information, support and activities to ensure good early learning and developmental success.
Baby Steps partners with Community Health Centers, Maternal and Child Health Programs, Homeless Centers, and DCYF where Infant / Child Development Specialists with a minimum of 5 years of experience provide developmental supports within the context of each of these venues. For example, the child development specialist will jointly see a child during their well child check up in the health centers alongside the physician and nurse. In DCYF, the child development specialist will provide developmental screenings and provide support to parents around development through home visits.
Baby Steps is a family centered service that takes an extremely positive approach to working with families. Family strengths are identified and activities are given to each family based on the unique developmental level of the child and the family's ability to understand early childhood development and play activities. Families are supported and empowered to build upon existing strengths so that they can ensure helping their child to develop in a manner that will encourage maximum potential.
If after the developmental screening concerns are identified, families are immediately referred to community based supports to help that child and / or family with whatever it takes to ensure developmental success.
Baby Steps also works closely with the primary healthcare staff and community providers to build their understanding of early childhood development and its critical importance in the health and welfare of every child.
A secondary component of Baby Steps is the dissemination of the Books for Babies . . . and Beyond materials. Every child receiving a developmental screening will be given a beautiful bag full of community resources, a developmentally appropriate book and early literacy materials. They will receive information about their community library and story hours. They will receive information about the first five years of development. And parents will receive appropriate play activities to ensure the building of early literacy skills.
Contact us for more information.
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