Resources for Home Visitors
Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health Resources for Home Visitors
Social Emotional Consultation (SEC)/Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health Consultation (IECMHC) is a strengths-based, relationship-focused service that supports home visitors in promoting young children’s and their caregivers social-emotional development and well-being. Through reflective partnership, consultants help home visiting professionals navigate complex family needs, respond to challenging behaviors, and foster healthy parent-child relationships. This section offers resources designed to integrate reflective practice into home visiting—enhancing the emotional support, developmental guidance, and connection-building that families need most during the early years.
If you are a home visitor interested in learning more about our Social Emotional Consultation (SEC)/Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health Consultation (IECMHC) model or services available, please contact us.
Virtual Learning Module 1: Recruitment, Retention, and Leadership: How home visitors support family engagement
This learning module will help you, as a home visitor, touch on three key aspects of family engagement. Starting with recruitment, you will learn useful strategies to help enroll families. Next, you will explore tips to help retain families and keep them engaged in the program. Finally, you will focus on empowering families to get involved in leadership opportunities so they can share the benefits of home visiting with others.
In Michigan, the hope is to have coordinated outreach on behalf of the local home visiting system instead of multiple programs reaching out to the same family, which can be overwhelming and confusing for them. Creating collaborative relationships between home visiting programs at the local level is key to fostering a coordinated approach around outreach. This coordinated approach will benefit all local home visiting programs and help the family choose the program that will best fit their needs.
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Virtual Learning Module 2: Home Visitors: Substance Use
This course will guide home visitors through the basics of working with families around substance use. The course will focus on the importance of building relationships, fostering safety, holding conversations around substance use, and engaging in successful screening and follow-up practices. To note, substance use is not the same thing as substance use disorder. Substance use disorder is defined as “use that causes clinically significant impairment, including health problems, disability, and failure to meet responsibilities at work, school, or home.” This course will focus more broadly on substance use, and home visitors work with families around prevention, screening, and support.
Virtual Learning Module 3: Supporting Caregivers with Cognitive Limitations
This course begins with a brief introduction which includes key definitions. The bulk of the course is then split into three sections: Reflect, Learn, and Do. You will follow a video case-study throughout. Each section is designed to take approximately 15 minutes to complete.
As a home visitor, your work poses daily and ongoing challenges, and brings new situations that will surface with your unique families. It is also one of the most rewarding jobs as you help families maximize their strengths, grow in their areas of need, and be as healthy and happy as they can possibly be.
One situation you may be facing for the first time is working with caregiver with cognitive limitations. Learn more on how to handle these encounters in this module.
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For more information about Social Emotional Consultation, please contact us.