Rosario Caballero Advocacy in Early Childhood Education

I decided to interview two people in the Early Childhood Education field, one is a current Early Head Start teacher she works in a toddler’s classroom. The other person is a Family Support Specialist where I’m planning to do my field work. I talked to the head teacher about my concern regarding children’s language development and how my experience working with them has influence the way I think. After many years working with the Latino community I have noticed that a lot of children are behind language development.

The head teacher told me that in order for her to know if the children are developing according a child of their age they use the ASQ’s screening tool. This tool gives them an entire view of how the child is developing on the different domains; one of those is communication. If a child scores low in the communication area there is a process in order to refer the child, the first and most important step, is the parents consent for the child to be referred. The head teacher stated that a lot of parents don’t have enough information on how this process works; some parents refuse to sign for the child to be referred because they believe that their children will learn how to talk by themselves. When the teacher told me this I agreed, unfortunately for a lot of parents it’s normal that their children don’t talk at certain age (3 or 4 years) sometimes culture has to do a lot with this and as early childhood professionals we need to advocate for our families and children. They need to be informed about all the services that are available for them.

When talking with the family support specialist, she told me that parents don’t have enough information on the referral process. She stated that Latino low income families are the ones that don’t get into the referral process as soon as possible, this is because a lot of factors including the lack of language. She said that as a family support specialist she supports the families during the entire process; but in her point of view early childhood families need a lot of support regarding early intervention services.

After interviewing these two early childhood professionals I found out that I’m not the only one who is concerned about the early intervention programs and how this affects children. I’m also interested on literacy programs for families because language and reading goes hand by hand. I think this topic has a lot of information that will help parents to get into the reading routines with their children.

As we all know exposing your child to books to an early age is a fundamental key for their success. By reading books to children at an early age will help them to develop a passion for reading, as well it is a great way of gaining new and sophisticated vocabulary. Unfortunately not a lot of children like to read, they do read but sometimes it's because they have to do it in order to gain a price at school. They don't do it because of pleasure instead they see reading as a work that they must do, maybe because is a requirement to read certain amount of books for a class. Students should see reading as a hobby. I believe parents play an important role in order for thier children to develop a passion for reading. They need to teach their children the beauty of reading. It doesn't matter if their read in their own language, parents should be reading their children a book in a daily basis. Public libraries are an excellent resource to get different genres books and are age appropriate.