Community Parenting Support Saturation Program
In Illinois, the jarring reality is that 29 percent of our children enter kindergarten prepared*. In helping children learn, grow, and stay healthy, we know that families and primary caregivers are an important part of supporting children’s growth.
The Community Parenting Support Saturation program's overall goal and outcome is to ensure the families are embraced and supported as the most important influences in their children’s early learning, and every child starts kindergarten thriving, ready to learn and excited about school. Working with three communities, Illinois Action for Children will provide support in their design and implementation of a community saturated approach. Leveraging our expertise in community systems development, we will support the community collaborations, spearheaded by local organizations, to implement parenting interventions and identify policy barriers families face in accessing early care and education services. Through this project, we intend to inform and contribute to the growing research on family and community engagement and community systems in the early childhood field.
What is a Saturated Approach?
Communities will identify and design a "community saturation" approach to providing family and parenting interventions that ultimately prepare children for kindergarten. Saturation is an array of interventions that collectively address multiple levels of parenting needs and is available to all parents of young children (ages birth to 5) in a community. Such interventions might range from high reach/intensive approaches (e.g., home visiting), to low reach/universal strategies (e.g., public awareness campaigns, parenting apps, etc.).