Seeing Your Place in the System

As you learned in Chapter Two, early intervention is a complex government system. Major policy decisions (like what formal assessments we can use, what service models we employ, and what topics to cover in professional development and technical assistance) are made at the state level, beyond the sphere of our control, that is, our ability to control something directly. What is within the sphere of our control, however, are the ways that we implement state-level policies, how we talk to families, the way that we interact with children and families, and the extent to which we employ culturally responsive practices. Our spheres of control may seem insignificant compared to Part C State Coordinators and EI bureau chiefs, but they aren’t. Over the 10 years that I was an EI developmental therapist, I worked with more than 325 families; that’s at least 1,000 people that my actions had a direct impact on. As an EI practitioner, what you do and say in family homes has more of a direct impact on children and families than the decision to use the Batelle over the H.E.L.P as the state’s approved assessment. You can work to institutionalize your own practices by crafting a mission statement to guide your work, scheduling time in your work week or month for research, professional development, or reflective practice, and formalizing the scripts or conversational prompts you use when talking to families about assessment results or, as you work with families, to model developmental supports that not only fit into their family’s ways of being but sustain the family’s cultural practices.