Once you understand your community’s needs and resources, decide as a team what outcomes will bring you to your goals, and what activities will produce those outcomes. The “Create Your Plan” activity will help you include some fundamental planning elements. The “How Do We Create Our Roadmap?” tool will guide you through a series of questions to help the plan flow logically, based on your circumstances. 

 

Your activities may focus on individual children, families, early childhood settings, or policy change within provider settings. There are evidence-based programs for working with young children and their parents together, such as home visiting programs that help model positive interactions so infants and toddlers and their parents can benefit and learn. In parent education groups, parents come together to strengthen their parenting skills and support one another.  Some programs include support specifically for pregnant or parenting teens. 

 

Could local pediatricians routinely screen for social and emotional development during well-child checkups? There are quick and easy tools that can be administered in waiting rooms and examination rooms.  Could the child care programs in your community share a mental health consultant to work with staff, families and peers to handle young children with challenging behaviors? As you consider different options for action, make sure to choose each one to match the needs and population you are dealing with. It may be necessary to adapt a plan that has been successful in a different setting, to make it work well in your own community. 

 

Finally, decide how you will evaluate your programming to determine whether you are achieving your desired results. How will you know if it’s working? There are tools you can use to evaluate childrens’ progress in social-emotional development, parents’ progress in learning specific skills, and other measures of successful early childhood efforts.