Baby face qualitative Evaluation

Family stress and crises 
In over half the sites (10), staff (six parent educators and five supervisors) noted the challenges 
of recruiting and serving families who are struggling with a myriad of other issues. While it was 
difficult to get families who are struggling to enroll in the program, it was especially challenging 
to keep them engaged and continue regular home visits with families who were dealing with 
ongoing struggles of lack of housing, unemployment, substance abuse, and domestic violence. 
These ongoing daily struggles may have been part of what made offering basic needs incentives 
so helpful in keeping families engaged; knowing they would get diapers may have helped some 
families work more diligently to keep their home visit appointments.
When you are in an underserved community, you have a lot of people who are crisis-oriented, and 
getting to a meeting is not their top priority. 
They were concentrating on their everyday lives of what to do to provide for their families, and that 
hindered their participation. 
Some are struggling with housing and some are running from the law. This is just one more thing to 
have to make happen in their day, and it is not a priority when they don’t have housing, don’t know 
where their meals are coming from. 

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Baby FACE 
Wilder Research, January 2015 
 
Qualitative Evaluation 
11 
I wish I could reduce crime, domestic violence, substance abuse, divorce. And I wish there was a 
better system of income coming into the house. 
Lack of trust 
According to eleven parent educators and seven supervisors across 11 sites, lack of trust was a 
challenge for recruitment and ongoing engagement. Some families were hesitant to have a 
stranger come into their home or talk about personal family issues. Parent educators were able to 
overcome some parents’ discomfort of having someone in their home by having “porch visits” 
(three sites specifically mentioned porch visits) or holding visits at other locations, e.g., a public 
place or the parent educator’s home. Parent educators also talk with parents in a way that doesn’t 
shame their past experiences or parental choices, in order to get them to open up. Trust took time 
to develop.
[Families on our reservation] are so shy, and they don’t want people to be looking at their house 
inside - they feel their house is dirty, or maybe it is that their drywall is not up. But once you start 
going back, having porch visits, you build that relationship, tell them about the program, [and] invite 
them to the Family Circle, where we have fun activities and presentations, and a free meal. 
Having mothers trust the goals of the BIE is sometimes a challenge. 
Parents had distrust for someone coming in and offering something for free. Like it was too good to 
be true. 
The problem is that in Indian country, it takes a while for people to feel comfortable with you. 
A lot were not really open to sharing their lives and stuff like that.