Sara Jane Blackman: Making Families Strong

“Happy families are all alike,” as Tolstoy once said. “Every unhappy family is different”—as are the problems they face. So, the best way to help them is through an approach that’s custom-tailored to their distinct needs, like they do at Parents as Teachers. PAT matches parents with trained parent educators who make regular home visits during a child’s early years. The educators tend to see families that face multiple stressors like hunger, substance abuse, unemployment, lack of proper housing and education—the typical list of issues that many home-visiting programs address. What makes PAT stand out is its personal touch, explains Sara Jane Blackman, director of learning and development at PAT’s National Center in St. Louis, Missouri.

“We are very responsive to what’s happening in families at the time we serve them,” she says, “and plan each visit with a family’s unique needs in mind. That takes some critical thinking on the parent educators’ part. So, the educators spend a lot of time getting to know the parents and building bonds with them, then learning what parents need and want. That determines the resources they bring to parents and the activities they do with them—all of which could change over time as the visits go on.” The aid the parent educators provide can range from coaching parents on child care tips, providing immunizations, screening children for developmental delays and connecting parents with services where they live.

PAT serves families in both the U.S. and abroad through affiliates like school systems, Head Start programs and child care centers that implement the PAT model, and Sara ensures the quality of the training that parent educators from these diverse programs are receiving. “I oversee our 70 trainers who support and certify the parent educators who come to us from outside groups. I also develop and update the training content that PAT provides. We’re always looking at the most current research and checking feedback from parent educators in the field so we can do more to support their work. Those are the two main tasks I’ve balanced in my role,” one that’s far from where she began as a college student.

“My original plan was to be a high school English teacher, and while I was in school, I got involved in a grant program to work with child care programs and home providers in Columbus, Georgia. I loved that work so much that I wound up working in family services after earning my BA. By then, I had come to believe that child care providers can only do so much to help children succeed. If we really want to give children a better chance, we must also partner with parents, who are the real experts on their children”—a conviction that led Sara to work for PAT.

“I discovered PAT while working as a technical assistance specialist and trainer at the University of Georgia Center for Family Research. Once I learned about PAT, I felt this is the kind of work I want to do,” Sara recalls. “I began around 15 years ago as a state representative for the group, then went to work at the PAT National Center about two and a half years ago,” Sara recalls. And working at the national center has not only allowed her to have an impact on PAT’s curriculum, which affiliate groups use to serve about 100,000 families each year. It has also allowed Sara to gain a deeper, more direct knowledge of how well the program is serving family members.

“We have always gotten feedback from our affiliate groups in the field,” Sara says. “Still, we wanted firsthand knowledge that went beyond all the medical and scientific research we were doing on child and family well-being. So, 10 years ago, our national center started its own affiliate, Show Me Strong Families, to learn about the daily experience of parent educators who employ our model. The affiliate was a laboratory for us to explore what PAT looks like in the real world.”

Whenever PAT wants to try something new, it goes to Show Me Strong Families for their input. “For example, they were a big source of support,” Sara says, “when we recently did a big project on prenatal and postpartum health and maternal and child welfare. They played a role in the training and support content we developed to launch the project. And their input had an added plus. While Show Me Strong Families was informing our work, they were also serving parents and children.”

And the parent educators in St. Louis and beyond have the skills to help families since PAT provides them with quality training, including core courses that count toward the Child Development Associate® (CDA) Credential™. And Sara encourages them to take the added steps required to earn a CDA®, as she explains “A lot of our parent educators have been out of school for a long time, or they didn’t have good experiences in school. They aren’t ready to earn a formal degree, so the CDA is a less stressful and more cost-effective way for them to build a strong foundation for working with families.” Besides, the CDA provides a mix of theory and practice that prepares parent educators for the real-life challenges of working with families.

Sara knows firsthand the roadblocks families face since she’s a mom of five who went through a rough birth. “When I had my ten-year-old,” she recalls, “I had been in the family support services field for at least a decade. I had worked with families who had premature babies, children with disabilities and developmental delays, along with all sorts of other issues. But that didn’t prepare me for having my water break after 17 weeks. The doctors told me I might lose the baby and I wound up having my son at 27 weeks. He was on oxygen for a long time and spent about five months in the neonatal intensive care unit,” an ordeal that opened Sara’s mind.

“I was going through some of the things I had learned in a theoretical way or by supporting other families,” she recalls. “Facing these trying roadblocks myself was different, and it has helped me support and understand families better. There’s a strong, two-way relationship between my work and my personal life,” Sara says. So, she empathizes with parents and urges PAT educators to meet parents where they are.

‘We are always looking to partner with parents,” Sara says. “We’re not barging in with an agenda that says we know better than you. We want to know the strengths, support and knowledge that parents already have. Then we bring parents information and tips to help their children develop and give them ways to build strong family bonds. We want to empower parents to achieve their goals—not the goals that we set out for them.” And the parents’ goals range widely from helping their children become school ready to finding them medical care, getting out of the welfare system and getting families back together when the children are in foster care—like one young woman who Sara will never forget.

“I met Tammy while I was working as a state representative in Georgia, and I would do site visits to meet families,” Sara recalls. “She was about 17, and I sat with her during a community event that PAT was holding. When I asked Tammy about her involvement in the program, she told me a bit about her past,” Sara says. “She had two children and the state had removed them, so they were in someone else’s permanent care. Now she had another child and didn’t want to repeat the mistakes she had made.”

It turned out that Tammy had come from an abusive home and had a mom who saw her as a burden. And Tammy carried this burden of the past to her role as a parent. “She told me ‘I never knew I could love my child until I worked with my parent educator’”—words that blew Sara’s mind. “I could talk all day long about health and school readiness and the way PAT supports families, but the discussion with Tammy stands out in my mind. Tammy had lacked the most basic parent trait, love for one’s child, until we worked with her.”

Tammy’s story about her unhappy childhood and challenges as a mom was different from anything Sara had ever heard. But the story had a happy ending since Tammy and her son are now doing better. “I ask her parent educator for updates,” Sara says “and I’ve learned that Tammy is now getting ready to buy a car and her son is now in sixth grade, where he’s doing great. These are small milestones, but they mean a lot to Sara, as she explains. Sure, Tammy still has a long way to go. But “there are no perfect parents, just as there are no perfect children,” advice from Mr. Rogers that Sara takes to heart. She knows there are no pat answers to the problems families face as they deal with unhappy, trying situations. “But wherever parents are in life, I just want to support them in being the best parents they can,” Sara says. She wants to show them that their families can be strong.