Just do it! Applying Cultural Knowledge in Home Visits

As you now know, the acquisition of cultural knowledge about each family you work with will last at least as long as your time working with them. You have to just do it- you can’t wait for the perfect time to begin or wait until you’ve reached some arbitrary goal of knowing enough. And, inevitably, once you’ve reached cultural proficiency with one identity group, you’ll be presented with a referral for a family with an identity you don’t know anything about. It’s key to maintain a joyful curiosity about your clients and a disposition for continuous learning. I feel weary of providing definitive advice, rubrics, or a how-to list for something as dynamic as providing culturally responsive home visits. Still, I do have some tips for how to conduct your first home visits after you’ve committed to just do it. First, I recommend being open with families about your journey to become a culturally responsive early intervention practitioner. Just as we take time during the first home visit to describe the early intervention process and explain how we’ll use our disciplinary knowledge and skills to support their child’s development and their family, tell families that you are actively working to learn about them and apply what you’ve learned about them into your sessions. Let them know that you will be asking questions not just because you are curious but because you want to make sure that as their baby learns about the world, you are helping them engage with the world in ways that support the family culture and pass on their Funds of Knowledge. You can even verbally acknowledge that there are power dynamic and cultural differences at play. It may feel taboo or awkward to you, but I assure you that the families are acutely aware of these dynamics. Many of the families I worked with and interviewed felt comforted when their White providers named it out loud and acknowledged it has to be weird to have some strange lady in their house teaching them about disabilities and child development.

Once you have these introductory conversations with caregivers, use what you do know about families similar to them to ask very specific questions. For instance, in the case study about my seahorse dress, I shared with Bracha on the phone that I had worked with many families in her Jewish Orthodox neighborhood before, and I said, “I know that some of the families I’ve worked with prefer that I not bring in any depictions or sing songs about nonkosher animals. Is this a convention you would like me to follow in your home, too?” By asking this question, I not only learned more about the family’s level of piety, but it was also the first step in building a trusting relationship with Bracha. As you read in the case study, just by asking this question and trying to meet their family standards, I had created enough goodwill between us that when I made a mistake, she easily forgave it. As with anything you are new to, you will make mistakes similar to the one with my seahorse dress. When you make those mistakes, quickly own them, apologize, state how you will do things differently next time, and move on. You can analyze your mistake and work to learn from it with your supervisor or peers, but it is never the family’s responsibility to comfort you or break down the mistake with you.

Next, one of the easiest ways to start applying family Funds of Knowledge into your EI sessions is to ask moms, dads, grandparents, and even older siblings what they like to do together and what they look forward to being able to do with the baby. This conversation will immediately give you a culturally responsive target to work toward. In Bracha’s family, she really wanted her son, Mendel, to be able to sit at the family dining table for long Shabbas and holiday meals. This training meant working with the physical therapist to identify adaptive seating and positioning options and strategies to help him sit up independently. It meant collaborating with the occupational and speech therapists to offer ideas to help with self-feeding. I came up with activities he could do with his siblings that would increase his stamina for sitting at the table. We also discussed how much time a toddler with Down syndrome and low muscle tone could realistically spend sitting at a table and worked with the family to come up with other options to keep Mendel safe and engaged while his family finished long meals.

Sometimes, families will share examples of hobbies that their children won’t have the skills or interest in for quite a while. I can think of two dads in particular. One was a former Big 10 football player. He really wanted his son to learn to walk and hold a football so they could play together. Also, his experience playing football at a high level gave him the Funds of Knowledge to set up a training schedule to help meet a goal. The baby wasn’t yet pulling to stand independently, so we broke down all the developmental milestones between pulling to standing and throwing a ball and went over realistic timelines and supports needed to master each skill. I’ll admit that I was skeptical of this approach to supporting motor development, but the child was walking by two and throwing a ball by the time he turned three.

For the eighteen months between learning to pull to stand and walk, the football-playing dad was excited and eager to participate in our home visits. He even adapted the family’s piano bench to secure hold toys to encourage the baby to play while standing and found adapted balls to put on the baby’s birthday wishlist. The other dad I worked with loved to build with Legos. He shared that he had tried multiple times to get on the floor and play Legos with his daughter. He knew that she liked legos because she would play with them by herself, but as soon as he got down to play with her and tried to build something cooperatively, she would get frustrated, scream, and pull the tower apart. He felt really sad that his efforts to share a favorite activity with her were going so badly. He and I spoke about parallel play at her age and how sometimes children with her developmental needs had very rigid approaches to play. We decided to watch her play Legos and see what we noticed. When the dad and I sat back and just wanted her to play, he noticed that she had a rhythm to her play. First, she dumped the Duplo blocks on the floor.  Then she sorted them by color. Once they were in piles by color, she would build tall towers out of all one color. Once she used one color, then she would move on to another color and make another tower. Once we noted how she played alone, we came up with strategies for the father to try to slowly work his way into her play. After about two weeks of first just sorting blocks near her and building blocks of his own single-color towers, his daughter started to hand him blocks from her pile that matched the color of his towers.

Lastly, while the prevailing wisdom in our field says that best practices in early intervention mean that we always use a coaching model of interaction with families, I don’t think that is necessarily true when it comes to working across cultures. To be clear, I am not advocating against coaching in early intervention. I am encouraging you to think critically about how coaching came to be the best practice model in the field (it was created by early intervention providers and scholars who are part of the dominant American culture and then researched, at least initially, primarily with families from the dominant American culture) and how coaching sits in a field (education and special education) with a history rife with systemic efforts to assimilate people into the dominant American culture. This doesn’t mean that coaching itself is a bad model (if it was, it wouldn’t have such a solid evidence base) it just means that we have to be very careful that we don’t unintentionally use coaching in early intervention as a way to assimilate families or whiten their parenting practices.

I can think of multiple instances in which I coached a family through a play or bedtime routine that was a reflection of my Funds of Knowledge rather than theirs.  The power dynamics present in EI provider/parent relationships paired with our working with families during stressful and vulnerable times in their lives means that many families won’t feel safe and comfortable pushing back on providers who offer culturally unresponsive strategies and activities for their children. Ibraheem shared with me that although he and his wife liked me and did learn a lot about how to support their son Ayden’s development, there were several times that I made suggestions to their family that they knew they couldn’t or wouldn’t do. Ibraheem told me that especially in the beginning he would just lie and say they had done them with Ayden because he didn’t want me or any of the other EI providers to think that he didn’t care about his son. Due to his lived experiences being a young, poor, Black immigrant dad, he (rightly) believed that many of the White women in education and human services wouldn’t invest as much in working with Ayden if they thought that Ibraheem wasn’t also deeply committed to the EI process. The realities of the socio-historical context of EI are harsh and we can’t easily untangle their legacy from our own

interactions with families.  For this reason, I caution against using only a coaching model of early intervention until you have a solid rapport with families, have done enough identity work to be aware of your Funds of Knowledge and beliefs about child rearing and disability, and have more than a cursory understanding of a family’s culture and ways of being. This process may mean that you spend more time than you normally would interacting one one-on-one with the child with the parent present or finding ways to share what you know about child development. It will certainly mean that as you make recommendations for families, you lead with questions like “What is something that you would like to see your baby be able to do in the next couple of weeks or months? What would gaining this skill mean for your family?” and coming up with ways to work with the baby to help them develop that skill.