The Catalan Early Childhood Intervention Journey to Family Centered Practices: What have we learned?

This communication describes the current status of early childhood intervention (ECI) in Spain. During the last years, some ECI centres have begun to promote important changes in the professional practices that are based on the understanding of the family as a critical context for the development of all children and, consequently, efforts and priorities in ECI have been oriented to the family capacity-building.  Since the beginning, our research group has carried out different researches focused on the understanding, measurement, and support of this ongoing transformation process towards adoption of the Family-Centered Approach.

The aims of this communication are, on one hand, to describe what we have learned from these studies (with a brief description of each study and the most important results), and on the other hand, to discuss the current and next steps we considered that is needed to assume at different levels of the Spanish ECI system.

Dr. Joana Maria Mas has a PhD in Psychology by the Ramon Llull University (Barcelona, Spain). She is currently a professor at the School of Psychology, Education and Sport Sciences, Blanquerna (URL), a coordinator of the master degree in Family and Early Childhood Intervention, and principal investigator of the research line of Family Quality of Life and Early Childhood Intervention.