Be aware of your own biases, judgments, and negative assumptions. Identify how biases, judgments, and assumptions may affect your interactions with families. Choose to approach families by holding aside biases, judgments, and assumptions. Adopt one of the strengths-based attitudes to guide you. Identify common perspectives and work together to understand differences. Ask for help from co-workers and supervisors if you need help doing things differently. Make time to reflect on your perspective and how it is affecting your work and your attitudes toward families. Before sharing your views, ask the family to share their perspectives. Share your own when it can help you both come to a common understanding.

Healthy relationships between parents and children develop over time through a series of interactions that are primarily warm and positive. There may also be brief disconnections or misunderstandings in relationships. For example, there will be times when parents and children are not perfectly in sync. A toddler may be laughing and playing with her mother and be surprised when her scream of delight is met with her mother’s raised voice, telling her to be quieter. An older infant may be enjoying his breakfast of rice cereal but he may be confronted by an unhappy face when he smashes the cereal into his grandmother’s work clothes. These temporary disconnections are natural and necessary, and they build a child’s capacity for resilience and conflict resolution. As long as interactions are primarily positive, children can learn important skills from the process of reconnecting.