The Role of Parents in Early Intervention: Implications for Social Work

Abstract

Parents need to play an important role in early intervention services to have a significant effect on children's developmental and social-emotional well-being. With some exceptions, the field of early intervention has failed to engage parents as active and primary mediators of the developmental services their children receive. This failure is incompatible both with the developmental theories on which early intervention services are based, as well as the substantially greater number of opportunities parents have to influence children's learning and development compared with school personnel and intervention specialists. Furthermore, an increasing body of empirical evidence has identified parent involvement as a critical ingredient of effective developmental intervention. Theory and research findings demand that early intervention change practices related to parent involvement. Social workers in children and family services may be ideally suited to meeting the need for early intervention professionals who are committed to working with families. This article describes an early intervention training program that is being integrated into the master's degree social work program at Case Western Reserve University.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 73 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.