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study participants and in program documents) included empowerment approach,
community development model, strengths-based, the Connect approach, asset-based,
and parents as experts. This was true even for Good Beginnings, where many families
were referred specifically due to an identified need for parenting education; one Good
Beginnings volunteer related that each family was like a “boat in a storm in the middle
of the sea, and we are like a ship. We come alongside and support them and help them,
but we don't tell them what to do.” By and large, study participants also described
many of the difficulties facing families as being externally rooted in the difficult social
and economic structures of the larger community. One manager illustrated this
poignantly. Reflecting on the high incidence of post-partum depression in the local
area, she asked, with a tone of frustration and disbelief: “What have we done in our
society, that women are so disconnected?” Many of the perspectives embraced by
these programs are rooted in the feminist ideas that each woman is the expert on her
own life, and that powerful, often oppressive, social and economic forces shape
women’s lives.
As outlined in Section 3.5.2, these perspectives are quite different from the more
individual and deficit-oriented stances officially adopted by many home visiting
programs in the second half of the twentieth century, particularly targeted programs
with paid visitors. These programs often focused primarily on child-related outcomes
(see page 35 for details), and lacked a critical analysis of the social determinants of wellbeing
and the difficult positions of overburdened parents – most commonly, mothers,
and particularly, low-income single mothers. As a result, implicitly or explicitly, some
programs seemed to ignore mothers’ needs and/or blame mothers for their own and
their children’s difficulties. As noted earlier, this stance can both mask the socially
rooted difficulties faced by families, and impair the formation of an empowering and
supportive therapeutic alliance between mothers and home visitors. The three
programs in this study have shown that it is possible to work for children’s well-being by
explicitly supporting mothers, as women and as parents; by following mothers’ lead on
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