Brazelton Touchpoints Center, Boston Children's Hospital

The Brazelton Touchpoints Center was founded in 1996 by T. Berry Brazelton, MD, and colleagues and is based in the Division of Developmental Medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital, a Harvard Medical School teaching hospital. Together with families, providers and communities, the Brazelton Touchpoints Center develops and applies knowledge of early childhood development to practice and policy through professional and organizational development, evaluation, advocacy and awareness and serving as a resource for proven practices.

The Brazelton Touchpoints Center is also home to the National Center on Parent, Family and Community Engagement.

Mission:

The Brazelton Touchpoints Center is dedicated to strengthening the families of young children and the systems of care that surround them so that all children – regardless of their cultural, socioeconomic, physical, psychological, emotional health, or environmental challenges – will be successful early learners and have the opportunity to thrive.

Vision:

The vision of the Brazelton Touchpoints Center is that all children grow up to be adults who can cope with adversity, strengthen their communities, constructively participate in civic life, steward our planet’s resources, and experience the joy of nurturing the next generation to be prepared to do the same.

We partner with families of young children and the communities and systems of care that surround them so that all children – whatever their life circumstances, challenges, and resources may be – will be healthy, succeed as early learners and have the opportunity to thrive.

Value Statement:

The Brazelton Touchpoints Center is committed to creating opportunities for learning and growth through collaborative, strengths-based, culturally-affirming approaches within its own organization and in its partnerships with all others.

What We Do:

For over 20 years, the Brazelton Touchpoints Center has collaborated with partners nationwide to establish scalable and sustainable, low-cost, low-tech interventions that propel children’s healthy development and build the internal capacity of – and strengthen the collaborative relationships among – families, parents, caregivers, providers, and communities. With our partners, the Brazelton Touchpoints Center engages in three principal areas of activity that are critical to attaining our long-term vision:

1.Professional and Organizational Development: Capacity and Systems Building: to activate and strengthen the intrinsic capacity of individuals, organizations, and communities to build and sustain collaborative relationships with and among families, their children, and each other.

2.Knowledge Development

• Nationwide Learning Network: to assure a multi-source knowledge base for accumulating and sharing knowledge, strategies, and solutions; and a community of practice to support efforts to expand collective learning.
• Evaluation: to contribute to continuous field-wide practice and policy improvements by evaluating professional practices, programs, and community-wide systems.
• Knowledge: to activate, in partnership with others, the construction, implementation, and dissemination of effective practices and innovative place-based, culturally-affirming, community-wide initiatives in the policy and practice realms.

3.Advocacy and Awareness

• Advocacy: to contribute and leverage cogent, credible knowledge to strengthen practices and policies that fosters the health and well-being of the next generation.
• Awareness:to provide a credible voice elevating and explaining the imperative of policies, practices, and investments that foster the health and well-being of the next generation.

Our Approach:

Our children’s health and development depends on the strength of their relationships with, and the well-being of, the adults who comprise their networks of care and support: parents, extended family, neighbors, and health care, early childhood, and other social service providers. The Brazelton Touchpoints Center recognizes that the individual members of these networks of care and support – as well as entire organizations, systems, and communities – act on each other through multi-directional connections and relationships that evolve over time.

Scientific disciplines from physics to psychology have long understood and applied this dynamic systems theory which, in the narrower context of early childhood development, tells us that no single factor acting in isolation can be responsible for a child’s developmental outcome. We are one of the few organizations in the child development arena to employ strategies and concepts specifically developed for understanding and enhancing these critical, evolving connections at the individual, organizational and community level, as they relate to the healthy development of the whole child.

Our Partners:

Families, organizations, and communities often encounter barriers to activating all available resources for their youngest children’s learning and development. Our strategic partnerships ensure an interdisciplinary approach to overcoming these complex challenges. The families, human service providers, organizations, systems of care, and communities with whom we partner are committed to building on each other’s strengths to discover and expand their full capacity to foster the health and well-being of the next generation. Our partners include: early education and care programs, pediatric health care and public health providers, and other social service organizations serving infants, young children and their families, as well as institutions with the ability to strengthen communities, such as libraries, children’s museums, family courts, colleges and universities.