Welcome to the Early Childhood Family Support Blog!

To understand what this blog is about, it will help to understand its origins.

The Beach Center hosts an online community of practice (CoP) on supporting families with children in early intervention. A community of practice, basically, is just a group of people sharing their ideas and trying to come up with new ones with respect to a common area of interest and experience. You can view or join our early childhood community by going here [Early Childhood Family Support CoP] and completing the registration.

One of the driving questions in our community of practice is "what information and resources do families and professionals need about how best to achieve good early childhood outcomes?" For us at the Beach Center, this is a very practical question because it helps us know what information to gather, research, and disseminate to help make a difference in the lives of individuals with disabilities and their families. Our CoP--which includes parents, professionals, and researchers in early intervention--helps us focus this question on particular areas of need (e.g. parents knowing their rights, how to partner with early childhood staff, how to find services, etc.). But the CoP isn't about its members asking questions and the Beach Center answering . . . far from it. Families and early childhood professionals have valuable experience, insight, and wisdom. A CoP is about collaborative learning, and everyone on the CoP is an equal member--we are all teachers and we are all students.

Some of our discussions on the Early Childhood CoP have been very productive. We have created tip sheets based on those discussion. But we lacked a medium for quickly and easily sharing these tips with people who are not part of our CoP. This is where this blog comes in. It is the portal from which the ideas in the CoP can be more broadly disseminated. This also gives people who are not part of our CoP the chance to comment on each of the resources we provide. This idea--to disseminate what we cooperatively learn and develop in our CoP--was the original motivation for creating this blog.

But then we started getting other ideas. We could post real stories from families. We could post news updates relevant to early childhood and family support. We could post summaries of research studies. We could inform others about early intervention resources available on the web or elsewhere.

We could do all these things--and I think we will--but we also need to focus. So what is this blog about? Early childhood and family support issues. What will you be able to find here? Well, to a certain extent, that depends on you. Help us decide which of our ideas to most focus on. I've put up a survey in the right column with some of our ideas. Let us know what you think we should focus most on.

So, welcome! and thank you for coming to our Blog.