Family Support: Fostering Leadership and Partnership to Improve Access and Quality

The federal Maternal and Child Health Bureau (MCHB) launched a five-year initiative that will support state efforts to build comprehensive early childhood service systems. This initiative – the State Early Childhood Comprehensive Systems (SECCS) Initiative - provides planning and implementation grants to the state and territory Maternal and Child Health agencies for the purposes of coordinating, integrating, improving access to, and improving the quality of health, early education and family support services for young children and their families.

This paper addresses the family support component of the SECCS Initiative. Successful early childhood initiatives acknowledge the needs of and demands on families today, as well as the key role that families play in children’s health and development. However, because family support is the broadest domain of the components outlined in Goal 2 [1], with services that are widely dispersed across various sectors and disciplines, no one agency has consistently taken ownership in advancing its goals and objectives. For instance, although some family support efforts are located within Title V and Part C of IDEA, many others are spread among a wide variety of public and private agencies from the health, education and social service sectors. Therefore, MCH agencies have an opportunity to play an important role in ensuring that SECCS Initiatives have a strong family support component and potentially serve as a nexus for similar comprehensive family support efforts at the state level.