Our project with Ellyce DiPaola, IDME and EdD candidate at Teacher’s College, Columbia University, which involves offering our Preparing for Caring: Touch, Handling & Bonding Practices (PFC) workshop to an Early Head Start community in NYC, continues.
- In March 2019, we held a focus group with prospective participants and received valuable feedback about how we can best present the material to suit the population.
- The three of us (Ellyce, Amy and Sarah) gave a presentation titled Preparing for Caring: Circles of Support about the project at the Body-Mind Centering Association annual conference in July 2019. We were heartened by the enthusiasm for our project and the recognition that how babies are touched and handled is a social justice issue.
- The culmination of our part of the project is coming up in January 2020, when we’ll offer the workshop five times for the Early Head Start parents, home-based families, caregivers, educators, and community. From there, Ellyce will analyze the results and write her dissertation.
Here is Ellyce’s update on her project:
“In November 2017, I submitted my doctoral dissertation proposal. I proposed a formative evaluation of Sarah Barnaby and Amy Matthews’ Preparing for Caring workshop to be delivered in the East Harlem Early Head Start. As many BMCA conference-goers and followers of Sarah and Amy’s work know, the Preparing for Caring workshop is a program of infant touch and handling skills for caregivers that grew out of and continues to be informed by, the IDME work.
The proposal was approved, the Early Head Start agreed, and we held a Focus Group, where Sarah and Amy demonstrated the core elements of the Preparing for Caring program while we recorded, transcribed, and then analyzed the participants’ feedback. Having made some changes to the program curriculum and approach to better suit this population, we are now gearing up to offer the workshop five times in January 2020 for the Early Head Start parents, home-based families, caregivers, educators, and community.
Each workshop will be preceded and followed respectively by pre- and post- surveys that will allow us to evaluate how well the workshop was received, what barriers the participants encountered, what the “stickiest” elements were, and to indicate whether the Preparing for Caring workshop influenced participants’ feelings of maternal self-esteem and maternal self-efficacy- the confidence with which they approach the caring for an infant.
The study’s hypothesis is that exposure to the IDME skills and BMC® principles of Preparing for Caring will result in improved maternal self-esteem and maternal parental self-efficacy, which we know from self-efficacy theory translates into better performance, and increased enjoyment, with positive impacts for their infants.
Based on recent feedback from the Early Head Start, we will also need to provide Spanish translation in order to bring the program to their majority Spanish speaking families. If the study proves successful, we will consider pursuing expanding the program into more Early Head Start communities, enabling the IDME skills and BMC® principles of Preparing for Caring to reach a greater and more diverse population of caregivers who might not otherwise be exposed to the IDME skills and BMC® principles.“
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