Home Visitation – Family Mentorship

About the Program

Home Visitation provides in-home parenting education and family support services to expectant parents and those with children from newborn to the age of six. Trained Family Mentors provide families with information and support that helps them improve their parenting skills to provide a safe nurturing environment for their children. Family Mentors encourage a parent-led experience while providing recommendations based on leading practices.

Home visitation services need to meet different levels of required support. While some families need support with child development information other families need targeted support to help overcome significant adversity. Above all, home visitation is responsive, flexible, and goal-oriented.

A Family Mentor will assist you to:

• Share child development information, in other words, what are the stages of your child’s growth
• Create a positive parent and child relationship by supporting positive interactions
• Talk about your health concerns and provide you with health-related information
• Discuss pregnancy concerns to provide you with prenatal and postpartum support
• Access and build support networks and resources for you and your family 
• Enhance capacity to face, recover and move forward from life challenges

Topics in the past have included:

• Fine motor skills like eating
• Gross motor skills like walking
• Language development
• Co-parenting challenges
• Dealing with challenging behaviour
• Developing coping skills to deal with negative situations
• Providing support to secure necessities, like stable housing
  

Program Benefits

The benefits can vary from family to family, but include the following:

• Parents improve their parenting knowledge and skills
• Children have strong physical, social, spiritual, and emotional outcomes
• Early detection of developmental delays and health problems in children
• Literacy is promoted early, thus increasing vocabulary capacity and language skills
• Children enter kindergarten ready to learn because the achievement gap is narrowed
• Caregivers have reduced feelings of isolation because of regular visits
• Children and parents are more engaged in their community
• In addition, a focus on strong attachment has shown to help create a resilient child with healthy relationships and good self-regulation

Frequently Asked Questions about Home Visitation

How often is the program?

Our Family Mentors are flexible to the needs of the family, whether that is weekly, biweekly or monthly visits. First, you will need to submit a request, then our Family Mentorship Supervisor will contact you to discuss which is the best plan of action for your family.

What happens in the program?

In this Home Visitation-Family Mentorship program, our Family Mentors will come to your home and bring age-appropriate activities that encourage development in language, fine and gross motor, cognitive, social, and emotional skills. In addition to this, they provide regular screening using the Ages and Stages tool for assessing milestones. Click here for more information on the Ages and Stages Questionnaire. Our Family Mentors also follow up with any additional ideas or referrals as needed between the visits.

When is the program available?

Our Family Mentors availability is Monday to Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. in addition to some Saturdays.

What else is there to know?

During COVID-19 we have modified visits outside of your home or in a nearby park available, weather permitting. When visits occur in the home all public health guidelines will be honoured. These visits still include activities and resources. A phone call visit with suggested activities and email resources is also available.

The program is subsidized by different funders with different levels of prevention and intervention. The assessment of protective and risk factors is done to determine the complexity of support needed. The program primarily services Southeast, Southwest and West Edmonton network areas, but we still provide support outside of these areas.

We are a proud member of the Alberta Home Visitation Network Association.