It is with great pleasure that I read Carol Klass's excellent volume, Home Visiting: Promoting Healthy Parent and Child Development. Dr. Klass has compiled a useful resource book for home visitors, their supervisors, and program planners who are concerned with providing homebased support and guidance to young families. I say "young families" not because this is a book about services for adolescent parents, but because raising babies is the first phase of the family life cycle. All families are "young" at this stage in the newness of the experience of caring for children in the first 3 to 5 years, regardless of the parents' chronological age. It can be a time of opening for parents, especially during pregnancy and the first months of their baby's life, in which information and caring by others can make an enormous difference in the lives of parents and children. Home visiting with young families is relatively new in this country and is one vehicle by which this can happen.
Dr. Klass's book takes an important step in professionalizing home visiting with young families by organizing the information that can be shared with parents and the how-to's of the home visiting process. The how-to's of home visiting are discussed in the first section of the book entitled "Home Visiting: The New Profession." For the program planner and home visiting supervisor, this section provides the foundational core of home visiting skills and activities which focus on the theme of relationship building. Home visitors create opportunities for parents to learn about themselves and their infant though the carefully bounded, supportive relationship they develop with each parent. Home visitors are able to do this, in part, through the carefully bounded, supportive relationship that they experience with their supervisors. This parallel process, while not explicitly discussed by Dr. Klass, is vitally important to the health of a home visiting program and is apparent in her writing about the many issues that arise in the process of visiting young families.
Two home visitors, Janice and Cynthia, have shared their experiences with Dr. Klass; these rich accounts are offered as first-hand examples throughout the book. I was struck again and again how these examples highlight the links between relationship building with parents and the effective communication of information. In this section, Klass effectively underscores and even presents the heart of an issue through the examples provided by these two visitors. I eagerly awaited what Janice or Cynthia had to say about a topic because they bring life to it.
Although the text often addresses issues from the perspective of providing services to a general, seemingly low-risk population, the examples of the two visitors clearly suggest another reality; namely, that of working with a family without adequate food or housing or with an adolescent, single parent or with a disengaged, depressed mother. These situations ring true to the work of home-based programs in Denver and Boulder, Colorado where families struggle with serious situations that threaten infant health and development. These examples make an effective bridge