Family Room
Parent-Child Center Services
Through home visiting and our center-based programs our multi-disciplinary team provides pregnant women and families with young children extra support when stressors are too great. Staff share the goal of helping each parent be nurturing and responsive to their child’s needs and believe in building on the families strengths to help them meet their family’s goals.
Staff for these programs includes Nurses, Social Workers, Early Childhood Educators, and staff with child development training. VNA pediatric therapies staff members also provide services as needed.
Janet S. Munt VNA Family Room
The VNA Family Room provides services to parents and their children from birth through five years including preschool, play groups, and parent education and support programs. The Family Room is located at 20 Allen Street (St. Joseph’s School) in Burlington. Most of the families that participate in programs live in Burlington’s Old North End.
All services are free to participants. Funding for these programs comes from state grants and contracts, VNA charitable care contributions, a federal fatherhood grant and private foundation grants, and support from individual donors and community organizations.
The Family Room Mission
The program’s mission is to foster characteristics that are associated with strong families and child abuse prevention. These protective factors are:
- Parent-child nurturance and attachment
- Knowledge of parenting and child development
- Parental resilience and ability to handle stress
- Social connections
- Parent support to access community resources
The Family Room’s goal is to promote healthy social and emotional development in young children and enhance school readiness factors such as the child’s ability to interact with others, and communicate effectively.
You can download a monthly calendar of upcoming Family Room activities here:
Family Room Programs
The Family Room provides information about community resources and partners with other social service agencies for more effective service delivery. The Family Room is part of the VNA Family and Children’s Services division and works closely with the Family and Children’s Services home-visitors to meet the needs of families. Family Room offers these weekly programs:
Early Education Initiative Preschool
This program is for three- and four-year-olds and is accredited by the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC). The preschool program serves 18 children throughout the school year, three days a week.
NEW! Worlds of Wonder (WOW)
The Nurturing Parent Program is for parents and their children from birth through five years old. In this enrolled, 22-week, curriculum-based parent education program, parents learn about:
- recognizing and understanding their child’s feelings,
- infant and child development,
- nurturing family routines,
- effective discipline,
- ways to build children’s self-esteem and confidence.
Family Play Program
This is a drop-in parent-child interactive play and literacy session with parent education and support, ESL classes for moms, projects to promote cross-cultural relationships, and a summer gardening/outdoor education component. Family play meets two days a week.
Fathers and Children Together (F.A.C.T.) Program
The F.A.C.T. program offers parent education, dad-to-dad peer support and weekly parent-child activities to foster strong relationships. The Family Room was recently awarded a federal grant to increase our father-focused services.
To learn more visit our Dads Make a Difference page.
The VNA Family Room occasionally has need of items from computers to diapers. To view their current list of needs as well as the wish lists from other programs check out our Wish List page.
For more information about the VNA Family Room, please contact:
Susan Landsman
Family Room Program Manager
(802) 860-4420
landsmanREMOVETHISBEFORESENDING@vnacares.org