ABC and Cultural Humility

Nurturing and responsive care is important for all young children across different cultures and societies. However, at ABC we recognize that culture is a major influence on parenting, from beliefs about child rearing, to familiarity and agreement with the ABC intervention targets, and feelings about home visiting. Furthermore, people may have different perceptions based on their community, race, ethnic group, early life experiences, or other intersectional identities.

We celebrate that diversity and aim to ensure every family that receives ABC feels that it is meaningful, respectful to their culture and traditions, and conscious of the historical oppression and forced assimilation of some groups throughout history. We aim to provide supervision to ABC parent coaches that is guided by a cultural humility lens and an anti-racist perspective. Among other efforts, we continue to work on translating and adapting ABC in collaboration with community agencies, parent coaches, and families from diverse communities. Consistent with best practices for cultural adaptation and enhancements of evidence-based interventions, in all communities we maintain the core components of ABC – those active ingredients responsible for program effectiveness – while modifying and adapting, if needed, the language, examples used, activities, and other aspects to promote the meaningfulness, engagement, and respect for each community.

The ABC manual and most of the materials for the ABC-Infant, ABC-Early Childhood, and modified ABC models are currently available in Spanish. ABC provides supervision to Spanish-speaking parent coaches delivering ABC in Spanish. In partnership with Power of 2, an agency delivering ABC in New York, we have also created a supplemental training and Support Group for Latinx, bilingual parent coaches in which we discuss relevant cultural values. The manuals and some materials are also available in other languages such as German, Mandarin, Norwegian, Russian, and Swedish.