This story was shared with permission from our partners at NNCC / Maybel Morris – Home Visiting program in Philadelphia.
Stephanie enrolled in the Philadelphia Nurse-Family Partnership (Philadelphia NFP) when she was 21 years old and pregnant with her first child. Stephanie gave birth to a healthy baby girl named Miya, and stuck with the program until Miya turned two. When Miya graduated from Philadelphia NFP in 2015, Stephanie’s ongoing goals were to attend college and find a great preschool for her daughter.
When she enrolled in the Mabel Morris Family Home Visit Program in 2016, Miya was three years old and Stephanie was getting ready to begin college at Misericordia University in Luzerne County. Stephanie now maintains Dean’s List status and works part-time, commuting to Philadelphia to work on the weekends. Miya is in a Keystone STAR 4 preschool, and Stephanie is an attentive, fun, affectionate mom.
As a Philadelphia NFP and Mabel Morris client, Stephanie has met employment and schooling milestones, which are measurable outcomes linked to the core goals of the NFP and Parents As Teachers programs. However, something that is more difficult to measure empirically is the growth of Stephanie’s parenting skills. For instance, Stephanie recently told her nurse that her participation in the programs has helped her see Miya as a unique individual. Her goal as a mom is to understand and respect this uniqueness and adjust her parenting style to Miya! Stephanie is an engaged parent, working to grasp some of the more philosophical aspects of parenting that have been proven to help children learn, grow and develop to reach their full potential.
Stephanie often talks about her goals of going to graduate school, owning a home and providing a great life for her daughter — and she takes steps to meet these goals. She credits the Philadelphia NFP and Mabel Morris programs for helping her realize that she wasn’t limited because she had a child at a young age, but just presented with a different set of challenges. Over the course of multiple years, Stephanie has worked with her nurses to build up her skills and confidence, and proven time and again that she had the resilience to withstand any challenge life throws at her.