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Thoughtful Parenting: Family Development Center

Colleen Miller
For Steamboat Pilot & Today

Traditions are a fun way to enhance your family’s identity with shared values.

Values provide a caring continuity to connect generations with enduring bonds. Creating or celebrating a special event in your family will develop a history over the years and provide meaning that help strengthen bonds among your family and nourish brain development in your young child.

When you are cooking a special family recipe, those scents become embedded in your child’s brain. That same smell later in life can elicit all those warm memories you made together building family traditions.



To select a tradition ask yourself these questions:

• What traditions matter most to you?



• What rituals and traditions do you remember from your childhood?

• Are there things you do regularly that make you feel close as a family?

Connections are embedded in our three programs at the Family Development Center. Discovery Learning Center uses newsletters: The Grandparents Club along with Newborn Network’s Parents as Teachers program and Child Care Network’s support of family child care homes reinforce the connections within Routt County.

Family Development Center educates and cares for young children and their families through our three programs.

To support family and children’s connections in Routt County, consider donating to our 501(c)(3) on Colorado Gives Day, Dec. 7, or schedule your donation today. A donation to Discovery Learning Center makes you eligible for the Child Care Contribution Tax Credit, a 50% tax credit on your Colorado state income tax. If you gave $100, your tax credit would be $50.

Discovery Learning Center, a nationally accredited preschool and prekindergarten, focuses on school readiness standards to over 91 children, with 25% receiving scholarships that are funded by donations, Routt County United Way, Routt County and the city of Steamboat Springs.

Newborn Network offers free services to Routt County families, including Parents as Teachers home visitation program, Bright-by-Three visits, group connections and parent education sessions with community experts, thanks to previously mentioned donors plus the Craig-Scheckman Family Foundation, Yampa Valley Community Foundation, Temple Hoyne Buell Foundation, Colorado Parent Possible and the Colorado Office of Early Childhood.

Child Care Network works with families to find licensed child care, provides training and coaching to child care providers, and assists communities with child care issues. Technical assistance and financial support to start family child care homes is available.

For more information, visit FamilyDevelopmentCenter.org.


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