Essay on Home Intervention Program: Families and Children

This critical essay delves into the topic of families and their children facing social isolation from their communities. It explores the impact of isolation, particularly on children, and discusses the importance of early intervention and prevention (EIP) programs. The essay highlights the role of home intervention programs in supporting families and children, addressing vulnerabilities, and promoting child development. It examines strategies such as home visiting and the application of the TEAM-ECD framework by Siddiqi, Irwin, and Hertzman to assess the factors influencing early child development. The essay also discusses community capacities, family capabilities, and various policies aimed at supporting families and improving the health and well-being of children. The discussion includes the influence of socioeconomic factors and the importance of empowering families to foster positive outcomes. The essay concludes by emphasizing the comprehensive nature of the home intervention program and its potential to mitigate the negative effects of social isolation, thereby promoting healthier and more connected communities.

Running head: Home Intervention Program
HOME INTERVENTION PROGRAM
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Introduction
This critical essay is based on the topic of ‘families and their children who are isolated from their
community'. Social isolation is a very important aspect of this essay, thus when an individual or
a family loses contact from their respective societies and the communities, this state is known as
social isolation. Isolation is seen in different age groups and it has many effects on the families
and their children. It is very difficult to be a parent as people feel stressed, alone and tired. As a
result of this, the families get disconnected from their friends, neighbours and social activities.
This isolates the families and their children from their society as well as the community.
Generally, families of a single parent, divorced parent, military families, parent of children with
special abilities, etc. gradually go to isolation from their community. Isolation affects children
largely. The children of the families who live in isolation, feel sad, bored and interaction with
others is very less from their sides and further the children who are raised in isolated families
feel isolated from a very early stage of life. They feel stressed and depression is seen among
them. Mood swings are also evident among them. This particular essay discusses issues like
early intervention and prevention (EIP) programs that positively impact on communities,
families, and children (birth to 8 years), allocated area of vulnerability, comparison of two
projects influence communities’ capacities and families’ capabilities to support children’s (birth
to 8 years) development, health and well-being, Siddiqi, Irwin and Hertzman’s TEAM-ECD
framework (2007) is also used in this essay.
Discussion:
There are some programs of early intervention and prevention, which help the families as well as
children who are cut off from their communities. There are many services of early intervention

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that support the parents and their siblings in the time of helplessness, disappointment, frustration,
stress (Fulkerson et al., 2018). All these psychological issues have a great influence on the
welfare of their family life, social life, and personal life. These issues have negative impacts on
the mind of the children who are brought up in isolated circumstances. For supporting the
families and children and for providing an encouraging environment, the early intervention and
prevention program (EIP) gives services. The EIP program for offering an improved life to the
children so that they can acquire better opportunities in the future establishes a base. EIP
program also supports those families, which have children with special abilities, delayed
development of brain and mind, etc. opportunities are provided to parents for improving the
relationship with their kids by the EIP program (Arney & Scott, 2013). The program to establish
the parents as the role models to their children uses a parent example approach. The antisocial
behaviour of the children can be recognized because of the isolated condition of the family. This
particular essay focuses on the children of the age group of 0-8 years. Therapies, treatments, and
counselling are the parts of the EIP program that are utilized to improve the behaviour of the
children (Wong et al., 2018). Isolation from the beginning of life affects negatively on the
children and it moulds the social behaviour in the future. The children may face numerous
difficulties while interacting with others in the school, park, and neighbourhood. These
difficulties make them more isolated as they feel low and do not want to connect with people
socially. EIP programs take an active role in resolving these issues and try to assist the families
to work out their problems so that the mental situation of their children can grow gradually.
Many strategies may be used to indicate vulnerability. Home visiting is a strategy, which is
short-termed and used for delivering services, thus the strategy is used here for women who
become mothers for the first time. This group of women needs assistance in greater extent

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because, at this period, women go through a transitional phase, which they have never
experienced before. Early intervention helps them to gain knowledge and this knowledge helps
them in their further pregnancies. This strategy is more applicable to those women who are
isolated from their society, resources related to psychology is very less and difficulties are
present in their lives (Strand & Eldevik, 2018). There are certain objectives of home visiting,
such as to assist the mothers in planning their family, create connections between local
healthcare services with their family, and give guidance to the mothers. Therefore, they can take
good care of their babies in whatever the circumstances are, improve skills of the mothers to
communicate with their children well, provide awareness of child development. It also
encourages the mothers to join their community, engage mothers and their families in services of
the community, provide support to take part in opportunities related to education and work, help
them adopt different life skills and many more. Another important goal of this strategy is to offer
new strategies, which will enable them to make their children disciplined. This will facilitate the
mothers as well as their children (Desmond, 2018). The discipline will structure the social life as
well as the personal lives of the children. This home visiting strategy has two key approaches,
which affect mothers. The first approach is the advice of the experts to the mothers and the other
one is the model of partnership. The strategy of home visiting provides the mothers to get advice
and information from the experts who are professional and this helps them acquire a true
perspective of different aspects of their motherhood and children. The other approach of this
strategy is to provide the model of partnership with the assistance of a home visitor. The
presence of this home visitor not only offers solutions for their different issues but also allow
them to grow a friendship with the visitor. This makes them connect socially and the isolating
state of the mothers can be resolved, if not wholly, then partially. These approaches are added in

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the home visiting strategy very recently to enhance the effectiveness of the strategy. Thus, the
vulnerability can be explained depending on the isolating condition of the families and their
children.
Child development is a critical issue for a community as well as of a nation (Ordway et al.,
2018). Therefore, all the nations of the world give priority to child development. World health
organization has taken a very active role in this agenda. Different health programs and policies
are made to look after the issue. The effective, cognitive and behavioural capacities of a child
must be developed for the whole child development. Therefore, promoting policies and programs
are not enough and more investment is needed to fulfil the requirements. Empowering families is
a major aspect in this context. The policies, which give importance to community and family,
prove to be more painful in terms of cost because the entire population is affected by this kind of
policies along with the children (Permaul and Phipatanakul, 2018). Therefore, the effects of the
policies will be long-term. In this discussion, the model of the social determinant of health
(SDOH) can be mentioned. This model provides information about the situations that impact on
the development and growth of individuals and the ways in which the resource distribution is
affected. Multiple researches show that social issues affect the inequality of health all over the
world. The model of SDOH focuses on health issues globally. Development of children is in the
central focus of this discussion. For promoting the health of children, factors related to society
are observed and it is found that childhood has a long-run effect on the health of the children.
The capacities of families and communities should also be mentioned here (Chi et al., 2018).
Community and family play a vital role in the childhood of the individual. Services for the
enrichment of childhood are included in the capacity building of families and communities.
Parent support programs, early care, and education, home visiting are some of the services of

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enrichment of childhood services. The capacity building creates the bases of good health from
the very early stages of childhood. Smoke-free environments, lead-free housing, minimum
wages, and seat belts are some policies used for families and children to endorse improved health
condition. There are several programs and policies of the state, which are implied for child
development. Earned Income Tax Credit Program is one of the policy (Siddiqi, Irwin &
Hertzman, 2007). The Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) programs,
policies, State block grants, and programs supporting parents, Income supplementation,
employee benefit programs, and many more.
Siddiqi, Irwin and Hertzman’s TEAM-ECD framework is incorporated in this discussion to
review the essay (Gehring et al., 2018). The model was built up for the commission of world
health organization for highlighting the impacts on ECD given by occurrences and surroundings.
TEAM –ECD stands for The Total Environment Assessment Model for Early Child
Development. The key factors on which TEAM-ECD is based on our political economy, bio-
ecological model, the concept of “biological embedding”, social relations’ research in human
society developmental psychology, the social determinants of health. These factors affect early
child development (Greenwood et al., 2018). These are the individual, residential and relational
communities, family and dwelling, regional environments, civil society, programs and services,
national and global environments.

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Total Environment Assessment Model for Early Child Development (TEAM-ECD)
(Source: Greenwood et al., 2018)
The brain of a child is easily influenced at the early stage of life by the peripheral situation.
Therefore, the development of the brain is the most required aspect of child development.
Nutrition is also required for this development, which is also needed for mothers. With all these
factors, there is a quality relationship which is given priority. The relationship with the family
members, society, and community shaped the brain of a child. On the development of children,
the family plays a vital role. The skills of parenting, culture, education, the health condition of
the family members, the internal relation of the family members, economic resources, social

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resources act together to take any decision regarding their children about their health, education,
parenting. Thus, the family plays a major role in child health development. There are some
features of residential communities which impacts on early child development. Physical, social
capital, socioeconomic factors are included here and the mixed socio-economic neighbourhood
helps children to develop better. The poor socioeconomic neighbourhood does not help the
children to develop as well as the children of the mixed neighbourhood (Kessler et al., 2018).
The skills to join the serviced of the society and the competency of a person is the human
capitals, which are promoted by the ECD program. The ECD program to acquire cognitive,
social, physical, emotional development does the promotion, which is very important for the
whole life span. Political, social, economic factors, the height of urbanization, resource
allocation are some issues of the regional environment, which affect the early development of a
child. Thus, by incorporating TEAM-ECD framework, the development of health of children can
be assessed and the factors and their impacts are understood.
Conclusion
The topic of discussion in this critical essay is families and their children who are isolated from
their community. All the issues related to this topic are described here briefly. EIP program and
its impact on the children, family, communities are explained with the objectives of the EIP
program. In addition to this, the vulnerabilities in the concept are discussed. The community
capacities and family capabilities is another point of discussion in this essay in which
empowering of the family is mentioned as the most important aspect. Different policies are there
to build up the family capabilities and the name of several policies are mentioned in the essay. At
last, the TEAM-ECD framework is added in discussion to explain various factors and their
influence on early child development.

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