Family Advocacy Program

Early Head Start

What is Early Head Start?
Early Head Start brings health, education, social services, and community resources to parents/guardians, who are often a child’s first teacher.  The main purpose of the program is to identify child development goals and support parents/guardians in meeting these goals through everyday interactions with their children.  

Who is eligible for Early Head Start?
This program is available to children from the prenatal stage up to age two-and-a-half.

Parenting Support Services

What is Parenting Support Services (PSS)?
PSS is an in-home parent and child/teen service that offers:

• Circle of Security: An eight-session attachment-centered parent education intervention program. // LEARN MORE
• Positive Parenting Programs: Focused on improving the parent/child/teen relationship and providing strategies to create a positive learning environment and decrease challenging behaviors.

Healthy Futures is a Middlesex County based program in partnership with Child & Family Agency of Southeastern Connecticut and the CT Community Doula's.

Healthy Futures is an in-home service serving expecting parents and families with children under five years old.

Healthy Futures helps new and expecting parents:

• Learn the power of nurturing relationships
• Create supportive environments
• Recognize your child's strengths and potential
• Focus on your child's development and foster skills for school readiness
• Connect with your children
• Access supportive services and resources in your communities

Certified Healthy Futures Parent Educators have been trained to advise families regarding their child's brain development, parental support and assist with parenting questions or concerns.

For more information, call 860-437-4550

Referrals can be completed here

Opportunity Knocks is a community collaborative of more than 60 health, education, and parent affiliates that addresses three of the most serious health problems for Middletown children: 

• lack of routine dental care
• poor behavioral, social and emotional health
• poor nutrition and sedentary lifestyles that lead to obesity

Our Perinatal Support Programs provide free counseling to pregnant and postpartum women, so that they can connect to community resources. This includes helping women find an obstetrician, or a doctor who specializes in pregnancy, childbirth, and reproductive health.

The program also provides direct resources to help pregnant women and new moms apply for Husky insurance.

Child and Family Outpatient Services

The Behavioral Health Outpatient Clinic offers families with children ages 5 through 18 services to meet their individual needs. These services include individual, family and group therapy settings as well as psychiatric evaluation and medication management. Psychological testing is available to current patients. We also provide psychiatric consultation for primary care providers and school personnel.

Child First

The Child First program helps heal and protect children and families from the devastating effects of trauma and chronic stress by fostering the development of strong, nurturing parent-child relationship, promoting adult capacity and connecting families with needed services.  This program is available to parents (or long-term caregivers) and children up to age 6.

Mobile Crisis (Previously known as EMPS)

24-hour a day, 365-day a year telephone triage providing psychiatric crisis intervention service for children and their families.  Mobile crisis in-person intervention available between 6 am-10 pm Monday - Friday, and 1 pm-10 pm on weekends and holidays.

Intensive In-Home Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Service (IICAPS)

Intensive in-home services for families with children and adolescents experiencing serious emotional behavioral problems including those who are returning to family following hospitalization or out of home placement, children at risk of hospitalization and children for which outpatient services are not sufficient to allow the child to remain safely in the family.

As the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, our WIC program serves to safeguard the health of low-income women, infants and children up to age 5 who are at nutritional risk by providing access to nutritious foods to supplement diets, information on healthy eating and referrals to health care.  The program is available for pregnant, postpartum and breastfeeding women and their children up to age 5.

Visit our WIC page to learn more