Day One: A Positive Beginning for Parents and Their Infants

Day One: A Positve Beginning for Parents and their Infants

About the Day One Video

Parents are their babies' first teachers. Day One draws from research by child development specialists and neonatal researchers on raising physically and emotionally healthy children who have the capacity to learn throughout life. It stresses the importance of relaxing and enjoying the unique and rewarding experience of communicating with babies. It reminds new parents of the tremendous potential of their infants, and of their essential role in the gentle development of that potential.

Day One has been successfully used in a variety of settings to share information about the development of the newborn with parents, daycare providers, grandparents, high school students, and community volunteers.

About Research on the Effectiveness of the Day One Program

The video was first presented to mothers who participated in a research study at Swedish Hospital and Medical Center in Seattle, Washington. New mothers were shown the video and visited by volunteers who were trained to answer questions about parenting and offer information about community support and resources.

During the follow-up study that was done to assess Day One's effectiveness as an instructional tool, University of Washington psychologist Dr. Sandra Mitchell found that a statistically significant number of parents had earlier, positive developmental expectations for their infants and that they tended to take more responsibility for their children's growth and development after viewing the Day One video.

Another study, done by the West Virginia Kids Count program, showed that the Day One program was equally effective with low-income, less educated mothers than those surveyed in the first research follow-up. The West Virginia Kids Count program also found that seventy percent of the mothers did not know the information presented in Day One, and that ninety-four percent of the mothers found the video easy to understand. The West Virginia Hospital Association (WVHA), as the new home for the project, received primary funding for the DAY ONE project through a grant from the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources, Bureau for Children and Families.

WVHA'S goal is to enhance the DAY ONE project and make it available to all hospitals and other provider sites throughout West Virginia. "We are excited to continue the work of the project and are eager to enhance it through developing new components," said Steven Summer, President of the West Virginia Hospital Association. "Enhancements to this program include providing new parents with information on WV Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), Women Infants, and Children's nutrition program (WIC), and other various resources that may be available to them and information on second hand smoke prevention. For most parents of newborns, the post-delivery period prior to hospital discharge is a "teachable moment" in which there is strong motivation and interest to learn. The enhancement of the DAY ONE project with additional information and resources builds on that moment." The DAY ONE staff includes Project Director Cinny Kittle and Administrative Assistant Amy Kuhns . They can be reached at (304) 344-9744 or 1-800-669-9842. The DAY ONE web site is http://www.wvha.org/day_one.

Who Participated in the Day One Project?

People involved in the Day One Project include:

Dee Dickinson, CEO of New Horizons for Learning, a nonprofit, international network of people, programs, and products dedicated to successful, lifelong learning.
Melinda Graham, Coordinator and developer of the Day One video.
Mary Ellen O'Keeffe, Program Coordinator, developer of the volunteer training program and the Training Manual. Dr. O'Keeffe conducts training sessions for the Kids Count Fund and other agencies.
The Day One Program was developed with the generous cooperation of Day One pilot project volunteers Norma Currulla, Carol Goldberg, and Sara Walker; training professionals Dr. Sandra K. Mitchell, Dr. Robert Telezrow, Gloria Myre, Ginny Bearson, and Dawn Gruen. Carole Cathersall, M.Ed., assisted with designing and writing the Program Manual.
The Day One Advisory Board included Robert Aldrich, M.D., Katherine Bullitt, Charles French, M.D., Judy Haig Hansen, Donald Lewis, M.D., Sandra K. Mitchell, Ph.D., Wendy Roedell, Ph.D., Michael Rothenberg, M.D., Gary Spector, M.D., and Barbara Vann, R.N.
Funding for the Day One project was provided by a grant from the Northwest Area Foundation in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
Inspiration for the video came from the work of the Venezuelan Intelligence Project whose goal is to raise the intelligence of the entire population of Venezuela, and from the vision of Dee Dickinson who recognized the need for a parent education program which would use new research to show parents how to lay the foundation for the healthy physical, intellectual, and emotional development of their children.

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