Socializations provide a beneficial counterpart to home visits. While home visits provide intimate, highly individualized relationships and learning opportunities, socializations bring parents in similar circumstances together to share their experiences, watch their own and others' children at play, and have the chance to make new friends themselves. Parents have many roles in the socializations. They contribute to the planning, care for and interact with their own child, observe other adults care for and interact with their own children, and watch their child interact with peers. Parents may make new friendships that live only within the socialization time or that extend into their daily lives. They get to share ideas with and questions of each other, and sometimes with guests from the community.

Social networks may be defined as the connections among people who make a difference in people's lives. Members of a parent's network can include friends, relatives, coworkers, neighbors, or professionals. Their interactions with each other may involve emotional exchanges (e.g., reassurance or encouragement), material goods (e.g., sharing clothing, toys, etc.), services (e.g., running an errand or babysitting), or information (Cochran & Niego, 2002). Parents who have positive connections to friends and families and their local community are more able to meet their basic needs, achieve their goals, and successfully raise their children. They are better able to overcome obstacles such as unsafe neighborhoods, family violence, and homelessness in order to reach these goals.

Positive social networks directly affect children's development by giving them opportunities to interact with a larger set of safe and caring adults. When children have connections with other adults, they are able to experience a greater range of activities and may develop new interests, different from those at home. Children's close relationships with a variety of safe, caring people provide more opportunities to develop flexible thinking and understanding different points of view. The number of reliable adult friends in the social network of a family is positively associated with a child's happiness, more friendships with other children, and greater involvement in community organizations (Cochran & Niego, 2002). When families are connected to their communities, children are more likely to enter school ready to succeed (Halgunseth, Peterson, Stark, & Moodie, 2009, pp. 2–3).

How To

Socializations are most meaningful when:

• A small group of families consistently attend together
• You identify similar interests or concerns shared by your families and incorporate them into the socialization
• You prepare parents to anticipate the socialization experience
• You take opportunities to connect the children's experiences to their development and learning
• You promote conversations among the parents
• You introduce community resources, such as "Lap Time" at the public library
• You provide a meaningful activity
  • One program took photographs and printed them out at each socialization. In the last 15 minutes or so, parents would paste the picture into an ongoing personal memory book and add written comments about the experience in the photograph. Families brought them home on Mother's Day or Father's Day and in the holiday season.
    • This activity could be expanded during home visits into a family portfolio. The home visitor and the family maintain a portfolio in the child's home that may include photographs, artwork, ongoing assessments, notes from the pediatrician, and important phone numbers.

Attendance at socializations can be challenging. Programs sometimes:

• Arrange transportation
• Provide a meal
• Connect with families to ensure that the dates and times of socializations work within their schedules
• Identify a few families and ask if they would mind arriving a bit early to help with arranging the room, distributing handouts, or assisting with preparations for the experiences or meal
  • Presenting these kinds of ideas to different families each time can help them feel more engaged in the overall process and help them offer a certain level of contribution to the whole group
• Award points that can be used for items such as diapers, books, or toys

Experience It 

Listen as a program director talks about the teamwork required to plan and implement biweekly group socializations, including some of the challenges and rewards. While the focus is on the responsibilities of the staff, she also addresses the various elements of group socializations. Discover the benefits to the families of attending group socializations, including access to community information and resources, as well as the relief from social isolation for many of them. She also describes the bicultural experiences that recent immigrants gain from one another and from the home visiting staff.

Last Updated: May 13, 2022