We provide parenting education and support for individuals with developmental disabilities and their children.
Program Goals
- To provide quality and productive parent support services including living skills, parenting skills, education, and child and infant development services to persons with developmental disabilities.
- To increase parents’ motivation to enhance their parenting skills and their positive interaction with their child, surrogate parents, support persons, and community resources at large.
- To enhance the parents’ ability to promote their own and their infant’s, child’s, and youth’s conceptual, practical, and social development, including but not limited to:
- Providing appropriate stimulation, play and learning environments.
- Providing a safe physical and emotional growth environment.
- Providing social/recreational interaction with other children and adults.
- Providing good nutrition, personal hygiene, and other home and health care.
- To train the parent in effective child discipline methods including positive role modeling and positive reinforcement including understanding temperament traits and tools.
- To assist with the integration of the parent and child into community programs, including increasing the consumer’s ability to utilize community physical, emotional, and social support systems in order to foster improved personal and child development.
AFW’s Parenting Support Services are:
- Exclusive for
- Parents or expecting parents 18 years old and older.
- Consumers of any Bay Area Regional Center.
- A person with a Developmental Disability.
- Unique in providing face-to-face, one-on-one in home Parenting Education. We gently guide our parents on how to adequately parent within their best abilities.
- Comprehensive by covering all aspects of parenthood and beyond parent-child interaction-bonding. (See our list of specialized areas of education.)
- Individualized in that each parent and his/her family will have a thoroughly developed Individual Service Plan (ISP) that addresses their dreams and goals, as well as our recommendations.
- Prevention-focused by being involved as early as Pregnancy and Prenatal care.
- Early Intervention-focused in preparing parents to learn sufficient skills that secure a nurturing and safe environment for their child and themselves.
- Effective in meeting specific court or agency related requirements in order to help parents safely raise their children, which includes court order reunification plans or visitations.
- Encouraging for parents who are troubled or feel helpless. We belief that each parent deserves to be given the developmentally appropriate opportunity and support to flourish.
- Objective in supporting special needs parents and seeking the well being of their children.
- Cost effective to Regional Centers and free for parents.
Specialized Areas of Education:
- Co-parenting and couple integration
- Child development
- Behavior management and positive discipline
- Anger Management
- Domestic Violence
- Stress reduction
- Depression and postpartum depression
- Family planning
- Reunification plan and supervised visits
- Temperament profile
- Family health promotion and hygiene
- Injury prevention and safety
- Family nutrition and exercise
- Household management
- Transportation skills
- Financial management and budgeting
- Connection with community resources, immigration, housing, childcare, etc.
