Now What - A Series On Parenting Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Statewide Apprenticeship Program Helps Child Care Providers, But Issues Remain

In the latest entry of “Now What? A Series on Parenting,” Chris Schulz talks with Kerri Carte, assistant director for WVU Extension’s Family and Community Development unit, about the Apprenticeship for Child Development Specialists (ACDS) and broader issues in the child care industry.

West Virginia is facing a shortage of child care providers. But a program developed by the state, West Virginia University and other partners is training the industry’s workforce.

In the latest entry of “Now What? A Series on Parenting,” Chris Schulz talks with Kerri Carte, assistant director for WVU Extension’s Family and Community Development unit, about the Apprenticeship for Child Development Specialists (ACDS) and broader issues in the child care industry.

The transcript below has been lightly edited for clarity.

Schulz: Can you explain to me what adequate child care is? What is the standard that we’re working towards when you’re training these professionals?

Carte: The standard is to have educated, well-informed child care providers. They need to have a good, basic understanding of child development, of all the domains such as social-emotional development, motor development, cognitive development, all of those. But then they also have to have the tools of how to manage children appropriately, as well as how to manage themselves. It’s not like you’re caring for your own child personally. It’s a professional position, we’re not babysitters. They have to be able to conduct themselves professionally, and do what’s appropriate within a classroom.

The standards that we’re working towards are established by West Virginia. It’s the West Virginia core knowledge and competencies for early childhood. Those are set down by West Virginia’s DHHR, Department of Health and Human Resources. But they also come down from much higher. There’s national standards set by the National Association for the Education of Young Children. And then there’s even higher standards of Head Start and preschool that are all national standards, but our program specifically is working towards the West Virginia, core knowledge and competencies.

Schulz: Why is having a professional in the room with these children so important?

Carte: One of the big things that we teach our child care providers is how to look for milestones. Every child should develop in a certain pattern. Not every child reaches every milestone at the same time, but they should develop. For instance, you know a child will start rolling over first, and then they might start pushing up, and then they start to crawl, eventually leading to walking. And there are certain time frames when these things should occur. When they don’t occur in the right time frame, or if a child is not progressing, we call those red flags.

Child care providers are trained to notice those red flags. If they notice that a child is not pushing up, and they definitely have reached that limit of where they should be, they can alert the family and say, “You might want to go speak to your pediatrician and talk to him about this.” It allows us to catch any kind of developmental delays very early. That is critical in early childhood because anytime you can catch an issue really early, you have a much better chance of working with the child, working with the family and correcting those issues. But the other half of that is to know what’s appropriate to handle children: how they should be fed, how they should be put to sleep. What people do in their own homes is their own business, but in child care you put a child to sleep in a crib, there’s not allowed to be any kind of stuffed animals or any kind of suffocation factors in it. They learn all of those safety things, and how to appropriately handle a child so that they can develop appropriately.

Schulz: Where do we stand with child care and the level of professional availability for child care in West Virginia?

Carte: In my opinion, we’re in a crisis. We have child cares that are shutting down, the ones that are open have wait lists that are miles long. I’ll give you an example. Recently in Charleston, we had two well-established restaurants shut down very close together, tons of press on that. It was all over Facebook, I was scrolling. It was on the news and the newspapers. But at that same time, we had a child care center shut down that served 100 children. There was one newspaper article that I saw on that.

I think some of the people in the public think we’re crying wolf, but we’re really not. There are not enough child care providers in this state. And I’m in Charleston, there are more providers here in Charleston than in a lot of other places. We have counties that don’t have licensed child care providers. There’s not a provider in Wirt County. There are other counties that there are maybe one or two, and people don’t realize how impactful that is. People cannot be productive citizens, go to work, earn income, help our whole economy, if you don’t have somewhere safe and good to put your child. You don’t have anywhere to send your child because there’s nobody there. One-hundred families were impacted by that closure, and that’s critical to those people’s livelihoods. I don’t think the public is aware of how critical this is to our growth.

Schulz: What are the barriers to adequate care?

Carte: There is a ton of overhead in early childhood, that is where the challenge is. You go to elementary schools, you can have one person for 20 plus children. When you’re caring for infants, the ratio is much smaller. One person can only care for a handful of children in order for it to be safe and productive. We want that. We don’t want one person caring for 20 infants, they would never see to their needs. But you start adding all of those various staff in, and it becomes extremely expensive. That is the biggest challenge that child care providers are facing.

Some of them are just making minimum wage or just above. You can go to fast food restaurants or some of the big box stores and get paid more, because those people are in a retail business and their goal is to make money. But a lot of our child care providers, a lot of them are nonprofit. There are some that are for-profit, but it is so expensive to hire all the employees. Yet they can’t pay them very much because their sole income is the tuition that the families pay for that child. It is so expensive already for families that families can’t afford to pay any more. So owners of child care centers are always walking this fine line between not raising tuition too much where their families can’t afford it and yet being able to charge enough that they can pay their staff a living wage. And there’s a gap between those two that will probably never be reached.

The other flip side of that is we look at our public education, that’s all subsidized by taxes, county levies, federal funding, state funding, all of that is what is backed, it’s all supported. There is very, very little support going to early childhood. Some of our most neediest families, yes, can get some child care assistance through the resource and referral networks. But it’s peanuts in comparison to what we spend in public education. We need to have the same level of quality coming from that early childhood that we do in our public education system. But yet our society is saying, “Well, you do it on your own, we’re not going to fund it and support it.” And it’s impossible. It will never work.

I hate to keep saying that, because it sounds like all early childhood wants is their handout and money, but if they want quality child care, we’ve got to invest in that. There used to be some employers that would do employee-based child care. At least they had the support of an employer that was backing some of that. There are a few employers like WVU [who] provide some assistance for their employees with child care, trying to help a little bit with some subsidies, like a benefit, if you will, and they’ll help trying to contribute to some of that, but it’s few and far between. Most families are out there on their own, barely scraping by to make it work. And then they’re trying to come up with hundreds of dollars a month to pay tuition. And on the flip side, you have the child care centers that are doing the same thing. They’re trying to make their budgets match without breaking the bank of their families, and the gap is too wide. They cannot bridge it.

Schulz: The Apprenticeship for Child Development Specialists program – how is that addressing these issues that we’ve been discussing?

Carte: The apprenticeship program is just like plumbers, pipe fitters, all of that. We provide classroom education, they do on the job training. Once they go through the apprenticeship program, they become journeymen, all through the U.S. Department of Labor. So it’s just like all the other skilled laborers, if you will, that go through the process. What part that I play in that program is, well, a couple parts. I do a lot of their curriculum development, but I also do manage the program in Kanawha County, and I teach for them as well.

West Virginia is the only state that has an apprenticeship program for child development specialists. There are other states that have looked into it, but nobody’s able to implement it. That is one of the great things that our state has done. DHHR has backed the apprenticeship program. They provide funding for it, which is a great thing. Our goal is to try to educate these child care providers so that they can provide the best absolute quality of early childhood education that we can, that they can. It’s a four-semester program. Once they get done, they graduate, they become journeymen. And then they are more knowledgeable, they’re better trained, and a lot of our students will go on and seek higher education with the credits they earn. We have reciprocity with several colleges and universities across the state, they can turn it into nine or 12 credit hours of college because we cover so many core concepts.

Schulz: They must already be employed, or do you all help them find a position so that they can work on this simultaneously?

Carte: They must be employed, because it is an apprenticeship program. It is technically an employer-sponsored program. So just like plumbers or pipefitters, you must get a job first and then they will train you as you go and do an apprenticeship program. What’s different between the child care program and the other apprenticeship programs is that there’s apprenticeship programs for, like I said, plumbers, pipefitters, carpenters, all of that, [which] have been established for years and years and years. It’s built into that industry, that they provide support, finances to back and pay the education and pay to get through. That comes through employers. The child care program is not set up like that. It is backed and paid for by DHHR. So although it is employer sponsored, the employer doesn’t have to pay money for it. But they do have to be employed because it is through the employer that they get the apprenticeship program, because they have to do the on-the-job training.

And in order to do that for child care providers, that’s back in their classroom. Let’s say we’re talking about literacy and that’s what we’re teaching that week. Their homework is to do a literacy activity in their classroom with their children, with the skills and the things that we have talked about in that class. That’s how they practice the skills that they’ve learned in that class. They put it right back into their classroom, do the activity. Then the next week, say we talk about motor development or fine development, they have to go back into the classroom the following week, and they do that activity with the children. That’s why they have to be employed, they have to be able to practice and get that on-the-job experience and training, but then also it is through the U.S. Department of Labor, and they require it to be employer based, so you must already be employed. Now, if you lose your job mid-semester, for whatever reasons, like, say your child care center closes, we work with that student. They are allowed to finish out that semester. It’s not an automatic drop out. They are allowed to complete that semester, but then they must be employed in another child care setting before they can begin the next semester of the curriculum.

Schulz: So what do you think is the benefit of having this be a statewide program?

Carte: It comes into play when we talk about ethics. Communities are small, you might know a lot about this family or not as much and you know a lot about family ties. So we talk about that. We’re able to target it to those more rural environments. They may not have access to libraries or museums or external things. We adapted to make it appropriate for rural environments, for those areas that need it. The curriculum is very flexible, and we’re able to take advantage of some of those things if, you know, if the community can provide it. And if not, then we look at other options for communities, then we present both options to the child care providers.

Schulz: Is there anything that you would like to highlight or anything that I haven’t given you the opportunity to discuss with me today?

Carte: I guess I want to briefly tell you my own story [so] that you understand where my passion comes from. My children are grown, but 22 years ago, I was working with WVU. I was considered a professional, I had a faculty appointment. But I was a single parent and I struggled to find child care that I could afford, that I knew was quality at the time. I paid my mortgage and my child care providers in that order, and then everybody else got in line and took a number. That’s when I realized that we’ve got an issue. That was 20 to 24 years ago and the needle hasn’t moved much, families are still in that position. We’ve got to do something about that. Like I said, I had a very living salary, a very workable salary. A lot of our families don’t have that, and they’re struggling. And I do think we need to work on that as a state.

The other thing I want to talk about real briefly is that the curriculum that we provide is not one and done. I think one of the things that makes this program wonderful is that we are constantly going back to that curriculum and updating it, making corrections, fine tuning it, and adding new information that’s needed. Right now, the Extension Services [are] working to update the whole entire fourth semester with a lot more about behavior plans and behaviors, because that’s becoming a big issue in early childhood. We’ve got some children that are exhibiting behaviors that are really challenging due to trauma and all kinds of issues. So we are constantly revisiting this curriculum to update it and improve it.

The final thing I would like to say is that WVU doesn’t “own” this program. The West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources (DHHR) does it through funding, and it runs through River Valley Child Development Services. So WVU is partnering with the River Valley organization that runs ACDS to help them with curriculum and instruction. So although we are a big factor as far as the curriculum and the education, the ACDS program is run by River Valley. That is an independent organization from WVU. It’s a great partnership. It really has helped, because River Valley does not have the expertise and the technicality within their staff to do all of this curriculum development. And of course as WVU employees we do, so it’s been a wonderful partnership.

WIC Provides Nutritional Support And More For Parents

Parents are often left with many questions about how to raise a child. Two of the areas that are most concerning and confusing are feeding and nutrition. Government programs can offer many different kinds of support as Chris Schulz learned when he sat down to speak with WIC Outreach Liaison Sarah Moore for the latest installment of “Now What? A Series on Parenting.”

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Schulz: What is WIC?

Moore: It’s a supplemental food program for women, infants and children up to the age of five. It provides nutritional assistance. The big thing we’re known for is giving food at stores when we help with formula, but another thing that isn’t known about us, we do breastfeeding assistance. So we have trained lactation consultants, they do all the breastfeeding assistance so you don’t have to pay for a lactation consultant and stuff like that.

We’re income eligible, and if you have a Medicaid card, and CHIP Gold, you’re automatically qualified. The state serves like 35,800 right now, and that includes pregnant women, postpartum women, infants and children.

Schulz: Why is ensuring that this particular population is receiving proper nutrition so important?

Moore: WIC was actually founded because they were finding that this population was iron deficient, so they are anemic and that can have really bad health outcomes. If it’s at a young age, in general too, but when you focus on that age and brain development, there’s issues with that, with their health outcomes. We do iron testing and lead testing. But a lot of our foods and stuff that are in our package are focused on improving that iron number.

It’s changed a lot throughout the years, though. It’s always good to go with WIC because we have people come in all the time that say, “Hey, I’ve EBT, why should I have WIC?” And it’s just because we have that nutrition, nutritional food, that package that’s going to supplement your food stamps, to make sure your child has a well-rounded diet. It just all goes with the brain development, and just your body’s growing so much in that timeframe. The toddler years kind of set the stage for the rest of your life.

Schulz: When we talk about the women that are served by Women, Infants and Children, by WIC, are we talking specifically about pregnant women? Or does that extend to the parents of young children as well?

Moore: So the women part comes from the pregnant woman and then postpartum because we serve up to six months if they aren’t breastfeeding, and a year if they are breastfeeding. But it is for all parents that have children in that age range. That’s a common misconception because it does say Women, Infants and Children, but yeah, it covers all parents.

Schulz: Is that why the organization nationally has started to shift away from women, infant children and towards WIC, to kind of signal that it’s more broad-based?

Moore: I would say so. Yes. Because there has been a misconception before with single dads and stuff that they don’t qualify, and we don’t want people turned away, to not even consider WIC because they don’t think they are the right target that we’re trying to get in. No, we accept all parents.

Schulz: Is the focus on healthier foods, fresh foods, how does that play into education beyond lactation consultation?

Moore: It is healthier foods. So it’s not like an EBT card where you can just go and get whatever food you want. There’s a lot of iron-fortified, low sugar foods, whole grains. We also have fresh fruits and vegetables, we do want people to have access, we also have farmers market benefits.

Participants will receive $30. So if you have a pregnant mom, a one year old and a two year old, that’s $90 to spend at your local farmers markets. So now you have your cash value benefits and your farmers market benefits. So like in the summer months, you’ll get a lot more fresh fruits and vegetables.

Schulz: Obviously, you’re working with the parents in your program to teach them about healthier foods, to teach them about how to avoid that iron deficiency. First of all, how is that happening? And are you addressing other issues like picky eating?

Moore: Yes, we are. Picky eating is probably one of the biggest things we get with that age range. But we do have nutritionists on staff. So when you come in for your clinic appointment, you will speak to a nutritionist, they’ll kind of go over your child’s day-to-day, what they’re eating. But we also ask for the parents’ concern so if there is picky eating concerns, or something related to that we can kind of offer suggestions on how to combat that.

We talk about weaning from the bottle, we’ve addressed potty training and stuff like that. So it’s kind of the go-to source for questions for parents if they’re struggling with something with their child, hopefully we have the answer and if not, we can refer you to someone that has the answer.

More Involved Dads Are Changing What It Means To Be A Father

Being a parent is a 24-hour role, and a lifetime commitment that has historically fallen to women. As men have started to take on more domestic work, what it means to be a father has started to shift.

Adam Webster has a lot of fond memories from growing up.

“My mother was able to spend a lot of time with us and we had a farm that we could go play and visit and help with work on the farm,” he said. “In hindsight, as an adult now looking back, my dad was working around the clock so that we were able to do those things.”

For many years, Webster’s experience was considered the norm: a father who provided the sole income for a household and a mother who stayed at home with the children. That dynamic has started to change in recent years.

A study published last year by the Pew Research Center shows that fathers now make up 18 percent of all stay at home parents, up from 11 percent in 1989.

It’s a new reality that Webster experienced firsthand after moving back to West Virginia years ago, when his daughters were still young.

“My wife was the one who had full time work when we got back,” Webster said. “I did notice that playgroups and activities during the day were mainly mothers. But there are definitely fathers out in that mix, too. In fact, I met a few good friends when we first got back, because they were the only other dads in these play groups.”

As men take on a more active role in child-rearing, what it means to be a father is changing.

Jessica Troilo, an associate professor of child development and family studies at West Virginia University, said fatherhood changed once before when industrialization caused people to move away from the home for work.

“As fathers started moving to cities to work, that’s where this notion of the breadwinner really kind of started to take hold,” she said.

Troilo said fathers were seen as providers, but less responsible for day-to-day child rearing. In fact, she said studies of parenting have historically focused on mothers, and only in recent years have researchers started to focus on other caregivers, such as fathers.

“In my field, one of the main journals goes back to the 1930s,” Troilo said. “If you look at parenting, it’s not parenting, it’s mothering. I think what we think of as parenthood is really based on mother’s experiences. Father’s experiences really weren’t taken into consideration until the 1970s.”

Beyond their focus on mothering, Troilo also said many studies in the past generalized a middle-class experience of single-income households, something that has become harder to achieve with rising costs and stagnating wages. As economic realities changed, Troilo said men started to look to different sources for their model of what a father can and should be.

“That Gen X group was really the first group of fathers or men to say, ‘I’m not going to look at my father as much. I’m going to look at my friends to see what they are doing,’” she said. “They started looking at peers more and saying ‘Oh, okay, well, my friends are more involved in nurturing, they are changing diapers, they are getting up in the middle of the night. So maybe I should be doing that, too.’”

Women still represent a majority of caregivers in America. The Pew study shows that the rate of stay-at-home moms has only decreased slightly, from 28 percent to 26 percent.

Troilo said part of what has held men back in the past has been a positive feedback loop of skills passed down from generation to generation, even perceived by some to be innate in women.

“I think it became kind of this norm, when a baby would cry, it was ‘Well the moms can handle’ or ‘The women in the family can handle this because they know what to do,’” she said. “‘Don’t let the dad try to step in.’ So then you have men not learning how to soothe the child.”

Jonathan Beckmeyer, an assistant professor in the School of Counseling and Well Being at WVU, studies the connection between young people’s social relationships and their health and well being primarily at adolescence and as emerging adults.

“Parenting is a skill. It’s a skill that people build over time,” he said. “They build through experience, and they build by watching other people engage in these behaviors. It’s the same thing for fathers and fatherhood. If a man is interested, or wants to be a more involved father in this child’s life, there’s nothing to prevent them from going and doing that.”

For many, being a father is tied up in ideas of what it means to be a man. Beckmeyer said depictions of fathers in the media often relied on tropes of either incompetence around the house, or stoic disciplinarians. As time went on, that didn’t fit with people’s lived reality.

“The kind of the shift has been a lot of men recognizing ‘Well, that’s not my life. And that’s not really a productive way to view other men and that’s not how I view myself,’” Beckmeyer said. “That narrative slowly starts to change within how individual men go about their family life. I think that’s been something that’s been really powerful, recognizing that good men can be emotional, and they can be supportive, and they can ask for help, and all of these kinds of things that have broken down a lot of the stigma around what is and what isn’t, masculinity, is starting to transition that over into family life.”

For young fathers like Cody Cannon, a comedian based in Morgantown, helping his son connect with his emotions is one of his key goals.

“I just want to make sure I have the impact on him that above anything else, it’s important to be empathetic and caring, and a good person,” Cannon said.

Despite not living with his son and being separated from his child’s mother, Cannon also emphasizes the importance of supporting his co-parent to ensure the best outcome for his child.

“I think it’s important for me to nurture the best aspects of him and to help make sure his mom is doing okay,” he said. “In order for him to have a better life, I had to make sure she also had a better life.”

Beckmeyer said kids need supportive, positive adult caregivers in their lives, regardless of gender, and mutual support can be an important part of that balance.

“Any and all parents and caregivers can have a really important impact on young people’s lives,” he said. “Mothers aren’t more important than fathers, fathers aren’t more important than mothers. It’s about ensuring that people are providing the supports and resources that the kiddos need.”

What it means to be a parent of any gender is deeply personal and individual, and there is no one way to do it. But according to experts, allowing for a greater variety in those roles can help create not just good outcomes for kids, but parents and families as well.

Parents Face A Digital Balancing Act

Digital devices and social media command more and more of our attention these days. Balancing this and creating healthy boundaries for increasingly younger children is becoming a bigger part of being a parent.

The COVID-19 pandemic changed the role of devices in childrens’ lives. According to a 2022 survey of parents conducted by the Pew Research Center, device use increased for all children between 2020 and 2021. One of the largest increases was in children that were under five in March 2020. Their use of tablets jumped from 51 percent in 2020 to 69 percent in 2021, an 18 percent increase.

Melissa Sherfinski, associate professor of early childhood and elementary education at West Virginia University, said the American Academy of Pediatrics does not recommend any screen time for children under two.

“After that point between ages two to five, about one hour of high quality, screen time, like educational shows,” Sherfinski said. “Then once kids are older, then there is more flexibility. But they also recommend for families to really think through a good plan for making some rules and even rituals related to screen time and the home.”

There are exceptions, such as to build relationships and keep contact with distant relatives.

“Unless it’s maybe through a FaceTime or Zoom, you know, talking to if grandma and grandpa are far away, or aunties and uncles are far away, and they’re getting that actual face to face and language content,” Sherfinski said.

According to Sherfinski, concerns around childrens’ screen time has existed about as long as screens of any kind. She said earlier studies on time in front of the television showed that TV was on six hours a day in many homes, one study showing that 39 percent of families with infants and young children had a television on constantly. She also pointed to a more recent study from Singapore that showed that passive screen time early in childrens’ lives correlates to attention issues in elementary school.

The concern around screen time is not limited to childrens’ direct usage either. In a survey of families around screen time conducted by Pew and released in March, nearly half of teens say their parents are at least sometimes distracted by their phone when the teens are trying to talk to them. The younger the child, the greater the impact of that distraction.

“What happens then with the dynamic is, that takes away from the parent’s ability to engage with the child, to sing to the child, to talk with a child et cetera, all those things that are so important for children’s language development, children’s cognitive development,” Sherfinski said. “That’s some of what some of those earlier studies found: that too much screen time, or even just background screen time with those really young children under two, can be problematic for their development.”

For young children, the consensus seems to be clear: less screen time is better in favor of face-to-face human interaction. Things start to get a little murkier when it comes to screen time for parents and older kids, however.

Elizabeth Cohen, associate professor of communication studies at WVU, pointed out that internet-enabled devices, as well as social media, are simply a continuation of long-established social exchange.

“The way that I look at social media is, it’s really an extension of other types of social elements in our life,” she said. “A lot of people like to think of social media as, ‘Oh, well, social media came in and changed the way that we do things.’ And I tend to see social media as more of an extension of things we were already doing. These are tools that we designed as humans to connect with other humans.”

Cohen said there’s no denying that people, in particular adolescents, experience anxiety and even feelings of not being in control around social media. Much of that seems to arise from what Cohen calls social comparison behaviors. That can be adults comparing their parenting styles to others, or teens and children comparing themselves to their peers.

“This is not limited to social media, but I do think you have 24/7 access to people to compare yourself to now,” Cohen said. “Social comparison is just that natural human tendency of us to figure out how we are doing by comparing ourselves to other people in society. There’s upward social comparisons, which is kind of aspirational. But there’s also a downward social comparison, that, ‘I’m glad I’m not that one,’ or, ‘I seem to be much better off than this person over here.’”

But she is less convinced about the direct impact of social media on these issues. Psychological studies of the impact of social media are very much still in their infancy and are confounded by many of life’s variables that make it difficult to pin specific issues directly to social media use.

“It’s really impossible to understand all the different factors going on,” Cohen said. “A lot of studies will use interesting control variables and stuff, but the reason I said I’m continuing to be very skeptical, because there’s so much stuff going on at the same time that people are immersing themselves in social media.”

The good news for many is that screen time and interaction with social media is something that – barring work and school requirements – is largely up to each individual’s control. But Cohen points out that a lot of the difficulty for parents can stem from setting limitations on something they struggle to regulate for themselves.

“It’s how you use them. It’s not like there’s inherent evil in the technology,” Cohen said. “We design the technologies, and we decide how to use them. These are things that parents really have to wrestle with, because they’re in the driver’s seat. You have to make decisions about screen time and stuff like that, but that’s hard when adults also have a hard time setting limits.”

She said a big part of the uncertainty surrounding social media in particular is because it is so new to have the internet, and therefore so much information, available with such immediacy.

“I think we’re at a point of figuring things out,” Cohen said. “I think some of this might even come down to etiquette one day, where there’s just going to be certain norms that we start to develop about what’s appropriate, and what we consider healthy.”

Sherfinski echoes Cohen that if used correctly, social media and devices can be used to enrich children of all ages and strengthen familial bonds. She recalls the story of a friend who lived away from her granddaughter, but was able to research bees and pollination with her over the internet.

“I’m thinking of, you know, all of the grandparents who have so many, you know, wonderful things to share,” Sherfinski said. “If we threw away social media and access to screen time and all of that, that wouldn’t necessarily be a perfect thing either.”

A lot remains to be learned about the role of digital devices and social media in child development but for now limited, intentional use seems to be the best approach for all family members.

Understanding The Basics Of Being A Foster Parent

From grandfamilies to kin networks and everything in between, families come in all shapes and sizes in West Virginia, and there is a growing need for foster parents.

From grandfamilies to kin networks and everything in between, families come in all shapes and sizes in West Virginia, and there is a growing need for one particular type.

In the latest installment of our series “Now What? A Series On Parenting,” Chris Schulz speaks with Terri Lynn Durnal, recruitment coordinator for Illinois, Indiana and West Virginia for the National Youth Advocate Program, about the unique experience of fostering children, and the need for foster parents in the state.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Schulz: What does it mean to foster? What does it mean to be a foster parent?

Durnal: We take what it means to be a foster parent very seriously in West Virginia. Really, what it means is to open your heart, your home, your arms to a kid in need, a kid who needs a temporary placement while their parents aren’t available. We’re always hoping to find more homes, find more parents who are willing to take these kids in. I often hear this statistic, “It takes just one person to change a life.” I think that’s the heart of what we do here. We need that one person or that one family to change the direction or course of a child’s life.

Schulz: What kind of person should consider fostering?

Durnal: I think anybody that has a heart to help children heal, that’s who should foster. Of course we’re going to take those safety measures to make sure we’re finding the right people to help foster, but we’re not looking for the perfect family and the biggest house. None of those silly things seem to matter. It’s that heart that you have to help children heal, watch them grow and want to make a change in their life. That’s what’s important and that’s what we look for when we have foster parents.

Some of our foster families have been foster children themselves. A lot of our staff members are foster parents as well. So when I say that we work as a family, it’s because we understand what it is to be a foster kid. And we understand the challenges that come with being a foster parent. That’s really what we’re looking for when we’re looking for people to foster.

Schulz: What all goes into preparing to bring a child or children into your home?

Durnal: We train our families with the state Department of Human Services who trains our families through a training program called Pride, I believe. Then we do the home study portion of that. We kind of all work together at the same time to get this movin’ and groovin,’ so we can get our homes licensed quickly.

They’re doing that pre-service training and learning all the things that they need to learn to become a successful foster parent with us and then we’re in the background, we’re writing their home study, we’re coming out doing the home visits, and things like that to get their license secured with the state. There’s no cost to being a foster parent, so there’s no worries about that. We cover all the costs that you would need for those classes and your CPR and things like that.

Schulz: Can you tell me a little bit about the need for more foster parents and guardians?

Durnal: We currently have over 6,000 children in foster care in West Virginia, and right now we have 1,682 children who are in therapeutic foster homes in West Virginia. That means these other children are in all sorts of different placements. Some of them are good, solid placements for them. They’re with kinship placements, that means they can be with grandparents or other family members.

Then some of them are in emergency shelters or residential group homes. And really, that’s the kids we want to target. We want to be able to find those kids home. These kids should be in family type settings. I’m looking at the numbers here, and it looks like we have almost 500 children that are in residential group cares. Finding them foster home placements is their best chance for success. Every child deserves that family-like setting and that’s our goal.

These kids are only in residential care because we don’t have enough homes for them. These are some older kids, they’re sibling groups, and they’re our harder-to-place kids. So that’s what, when we’re out in the community, and we’re looking for foster parents, and we’re speaking at churches and we’re speaking at events, those are the homes that we’re looking for the families that can take in these hard-to-place children.

Schulz: How do you all help families prepare for that change? Especially if they’re coming in with the expectation of having a very young child?

Durnal: I think there’s a lot of myths about foster care. I think people just in general will think they want a baby, or babies are going to be easier because they’re not mouthy teenagers. But I’ll tell you, I have two little kids of my own. And I took in an 18-year-old teenager, and by far my 18 year old is 10 times easier. I mean, she can take a bath by herself. There’s no doubt, there’s no diapers. It’s so fun having a teenager in your home and I have to say we have some good teens that come into care. I got to watch my teenager, prepare and get her license. I got to help her, find college classes, help find her first job, get her first apartment, get her first car on her own, and see her make these changes in her life that have led her to be a successful adult. And it’s so rewarding. It’s so rewarding.

There’s another myth I think people have about birth order. A lot of people who are thinking about foster care probably have some younger kiddos and they think, “I just want to keep my family’s birth order,” and “My oldest kid should stay my oldest kid.” I have to say, my 18 year old came into our lives and my little ones, they look at her very much as their, that’s their sister, that’s their older sister. They have built the best bond over the last few years that anybody could ever ask for. So I would just tell people, it’s not scary, it doesn’t have to be scary.

This is probably the most important thing to remember, these children and these teenagers are not into care because of something they’ve done. They didn’t get in trouble and get put in foster care. That’s not what happened. They’re in foster care because of something that’s happened in their home life, their family life. These kids want to be loved. They want to be normal teenage kids, they want to do sports at school. We as a society, I think we should feel obligated to give them that, to give them that normal childhood.

Understanding How Babies Sleep

Sleep is a key part of both mental and physical health for everyone. But for many parents, ensuring their baby is getting good sleep can be frustrating and elusive. In the latest installment of our new series “Now What? A Series On Parenting,” we speak with an expert about infant sleep.

Sleep is a key part of both mental and physical health for everyone. But for many parents, ensuring their baby is getting good sleep can be frustrating and elusive.

In the latest installment of our new series “Now What? A Series On Parenting,” reporter Chris Schulz speaks with Dr. Paul Knowles, a Marshall Health neurologist and assistant professor at Marshall University Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine, about infant sleep.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Dr. Paul Knowles, Marshall Health neurologist and assistant professor at Marshall University Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine.

*Courtesy of Marshall Health*

Schulz: Why is sleep so important for everyone?

Knowles: We are built to spend a third of our time alive asleep, a third or more. And unfortunately, as a culture, we have de-emphasized the need for sleep. Everybody’s like, “Well, I have all these things to do.” And the thing that typically gets whittled away is sleep. But sleep is important because it restores you physically and also restores you mentally.

There are a number of studies that show that sleep is probably important in learning, that people who study for a test and then get a good night’s sleep are much more likely to recall all the facts and do better on the test than somebody who stays up all night and crams. There’s lots of theories and questions, and we certainly don’t fully understand exactly what it does. What purpose does dreaming serve? Some people feel it’s your way to work through emotions and things. It’s clear that sleep serves a major restorative function. But in addition to that, it’s important in learning, how we’re organizing your brain in your mind and things like that.

Schulz: Can you tell me a little bit about why infant and child sleep is different from adult sleep?

Knowles: Anybody who’s had a baby knows it’s different. Particularly newborns don’t sleep like the rest of us. As an older child or an adult, you go through sleeping, you move into the lighter stages of sleep and eventually get to deeper stages of sleep and then into REM sleep or dream sleep. Newborns move immediately into REM sleep. Their neurological systems are not mature enough that they have prolonged sleep the way we do.

Most “normal people” sleep eight hours at night, seven to nine hours at night as sort of a single block and that’s our sleep for the day. Infants sleep 16, 17 hours a day, but rarely more than a couple hours at a time. Sometimes they’ll nap and only be five, 10, 15 minutes, and sometimes they’ll nap and it’ll be four hours. The typical newborns have like seven or eight cycles through the day of wake and sleep. They sleep in little, little cat naps through the 24 hour cycle, rather than one single long-term block of sleep that you do as an adult. That matures over the first three to six months. Usually by three to four months, they’re starting to sleep the majority of the night. You get a good five or six hour block where you get sleep, and usually by six or seven months, they’re basically sleeping through the night.

Of course, one of the major issues is, the babies never read the texts. You have lots of families who come in and complain that their one-year-old still isn’t sleeping through the night. I had a colleague of mine years ago, we were complimenting him on how nice his teenager was, and he says, “The last time the boy did anything right was he slept through the night two weeks after he was born.” So there’s wide individual variation, but you can’t really expect a newborn. Some parents get frustrated when their two-month-old isn’t sleeping through the night yet. And it’s because physiologically, they’re just not there yet. Their systems haven’t matured to the point where they can sustain sleep for that long.

Schulz: Is there anything that parents can do to help that process along, or is it just a question of waiting?

Knowles: I mean, there’s a little bit but to some degree, you have to wait for the baby to mature. It’s the same thing as, the baby can’t walk until the baby has the strength and the coordination to put the muscles together and perform the action. It’s the same thing. You’re not going to be able to train your one month old to sleep through the night. You might be one of the lucky ones where the baby really does, at an early age, get a bigger block, and you get more consolidated sleep yourself. But most parents learn to sort of sleep when the baby does, and their sleep is more disruptive than we’re used to, and we don’t feel as good. But again, over three or four months, you start to get longer blocks.

I think the parents, particularly as the child gets to be older, keeping a good routine really helps to consolidate that. I see parents and unfortunately, again, it’s a part of our culture – and this is talking typically a little bit more about the older kids – where the kids over the course of the week may sleep in three different places. They may spend a couple of days with the grandparents, a couple of days with mom, a couple of days with dad if mom and dad are separated, divorced. And everybody has a different schedule. Then they’re complaining that their children are having sleep issues. Well, part of that is because grandma’s trying to get them to sleep at 7 p.m., and mom’s letting them stay up to 10 p.m. And dad doesn’t care if they want to stay up and play video games to 1 a.m., he’s fine with that. So they have a different schedule everywhere they go and they’re having problems training their body what their routine should be.

Schulz: Does the space itself also contribute? Because I know especially for infants, there’s a lot of discussion about when to move them out of the bassinet and into the crib into a different room, etc. Does that have an influence on children generally, as much as having a regular schedule and routine does?

Knowles: I think probably the routine is a little bit more important. Obviously, you want a comfortable space. As a culture, we tend to discourage, you know, co-sleeping where the baby’s actually in the bed with you. My big issue actually with them having them in the same room is it’s very convenient for mom and dad, but sometimes mom and dad are disrupting the kids’ sleep. If somebody is a loud snorer, or has something like sleep apnea and is making loud noises and they’re disrupting the child’s sleep. So that becomes a component of trying to get them to sleep through the night, if their parents are actually contributing to the disruption.

Schulz: Sleep training, is there an evidence base to support this approach to encouraging independent sleep? What can you tell me about this process?

Knowles: There are several different mechanisms that are talked about. Perhaps one of the most well known is their Ferber method. Dr. Ferber wrote a kind of textbook, but it’s really actually written for the parent. It’s gone through multiple editions and I’ll be honest, I don’t know when he first wrote it. It was the ’70s or ’80s. He talks about methods to try and help train your child to go to sleep without you, to be able to put them down. Let them get used to the bed, let them self-soothe.

He talks about if they wake up and they’re fussy, you don’t go in and you don’t console them, you go and check on them and maybe briefly console if they’re really ramping up, but then you leave before they’re asleep so they eventually learn that they’re going to have to fall asleep in bed themselves. There are some studies showing that these sort of mechanisms work. And there’s several somewhat variable ways to do it, but people talk about Ferber-ising the bedroom routine, and his is probably one of the most famous ways to do it.

Schulz: So would you say that push back in recent years has more to do with parents and other caregivers, just not really being able to tough out that period of adjustment where the baby is expressing its displeasure?

Knowles: Each individual case is different and sometimes, there may be other issues going on. I think a lot of times it is difficult for the parents learning, too. And I’ll be honest with you, when my kids were little, and I’m in my 60s now, but when I had little kids, my first one, my wife fussed at me because the baby started crying, I started getting out of bed, she says, “Just leave her.” And I said “She’s crying.” She says, “Just leave her.” And sure enough, you know, five minutes later, she fussed for a couple minutes then rolled over and fell back asleep and I didn’t have to get up.

But you know, the baby had trained me. When she was little, she fussed, because she was either wet or she needed to feed. So I was sort of trained, “Oh, she starts to fuss, she needs something changed or something done.” My wife was the one to say, “Better let her soothe herself if she will.”

Schulz: It’s always reassuring to hear an expert say that they go through the same issues as everybody else.

Knowles: Oh, yeah. It’s always different when it’s your kid. As somebody who trained in pediatrics, you learn that at a relatively young stage, it’s one thing to sit there and tell the parent, “This is what you got to do.” Then when you’re living through it yourself, it’s trying to remember what you tell everybody what to do, sometimes it’s hard.

Schulz: I wanted to jump back to a statement that you made earlier on in our conversation. It always fascinates me, I spoke to a pediatrician a few weeks ago who told me that the way she looks at it is the first three months of a baby’s life is basically the fourth trimester because their neurology and their brains are so underdeveloped, and then they still need that time to finish the work that was started in the womb. Does that bear true for you in your work with infants and what you’ve seen over the years?

Knowles: I think that that absolutely is true. In the first three or four months, it’s really obvious. Obviously our brains are changing for much longer than that. We make new neuronal connections well into adolescence. Our brain grows and changes over the years, but particularly the first year.

The easiest example of that is white matter. It’s called white because of the presence of what we call myelin, which is the sheath around the nerves, that not only protects the nerves, but also actually impacts the functions of the nerves. Myelinated nerves tend to send impulses faster than unmyelinated nerves, and not all nerves are myelinated. But if you do an MRI on a newborn, there is very little myelin in the brain, there’s only a couple places. And then if you do repetitive MRIs up to about a year, or just over a year, you see increasing amounts of change, a maturational change in that brain.

You can see that on a physical basis by the myelin developing and growing in the brain that clearly correlates as you get that more myelin, you get more control. So the baby suddenly isn’t just waving their hands around, but now is starting to reach for objects, no longer does a Palmer grasp, but does pincer grasp, is no longer just making simple sounds, but is making complex sounds. That all correlates together. Particularly the first few months, but even that first year, year and a half, there’s a dramatic maturational change in the brain that occurs. It has an impact on just normal development, but also maturation of your sleep habits and everything else.

Schulz: Is there anything else that I haven’t given you an opportunity to discuss, or something that you’d like to highlight?

Knowles: I think it’s what we started with: sleep really is important. As a culture, we have tended to de-emphasize how important it is particularly for the young developing brain. Having that opportunity to sleep and keeping a normal cycle really does improve maturation and development of the brain.