An Athens Home Visiting Expert Was Herself a Beneficiary of this Innovative Programming

Brenda Parra is an associate at Brightpaths, an Athens-based community organization that supports families through connection and education about child development. This means she spends many of her workdays room-hopping through the Mother/Baby unit of Piedmont Athens Regional Medical Center.  

“I visit moms at the hospital,” she explains. “I share resources and child development information, stuff like that.”   

She also offers qualifying families an opportunity to receive Evidence-Based Home Visiting. This service, in which a Family Support Specialist comes to your home on a regular basis to provide support tailored to the needs of a family, feels unusually personal; a throwback to the days when health practitioners made house calls.  

When she encourages parents to open their doors to a home visitor, Parra knows of what she speaks. She herself said yes when she received the same offer four years ago.  

“My son was born in August 2020,” she says, painting a picture with a single sentence of the hardships she faced. Her pandemic baby, Andres, arrived when Parra was also newly married and parenting two-year-old Miracle, a daughter she’d adopted from the foster care system. The entire family was living with Parra’s parents.  

“The first message my family support specialist sent me was a picture of her, which was really nice because I like seeing faces and names,” Parra recalls of her virtual sessions. (These days, most home visiting is again in person.) “And honestly, it just felt like I was talking to somebody. It didn’t feel super formal. I could trust her. I could tell her anything. Whenever I had questions, she would answer them or always give me options or advice. She’s very wise.” 

Together, Parra and her home visitor made goals for Andres, like teaching him to feed himself with a spoon. But because home visiting takes a holistic approach to supporting babies, Parra could also talk to her support specialist about other challenges in her family, like navigating parenting clashes with both her husband and her mother. She also confided that she wanted her family of four to move out of her parents’ home.  

“She referred [me and my new husband] to couples counseling,” Parra recalls. “And kept me accountable. Like I couldn’t just say, ‘Oh, I want to move out,’ and not do anything about it. She would always bring it up and make sure I was sticking to my goals.”  

Now, having just finished four years of weekly home visits for Andres and two years into her career at Brightpaths, Parra knows all the ways a home visitor can offer aid. They can track milestones, counsel parents through challenges, and help families set personal and parenting goals. They can also be a listening ear for the concerns Parra says she hears about most from the parents she visits in the hospital: Medicaid eligibility, the elusiveness of CAPS child care subsidies, and the preponderance and expense of diapers.  

“You can discuss anything you want. For me, it was just nice to have somebody there to talk to about things I didn’t want to talk to my mom about,” Parra says, a point she makes when some new parents balk at the idea of a stranger coming into their home and their private business. “You really do build a relationship with them.”