For enrolled Early Head Start (EHS) families, Yeled v’Yalda (YvY) provides services for pregnant women. These services include prenatal and postpartum information, education, and other referral and support services. It also includes family partnership services like those offered to parents of infants and toddlers in EHS. With these services, YvY can enroll expectant mothers into Early Head Start before the expectant mother gives birth, in order to ensure that the required prenatal and postpartum services are made available, and to begin family partnership services sooner. These family partnership services typically include information and support about housing, income and return to work (now that family size is increasing), paternity, postpartum depression, and other behavioral health issues.

Since YvY has such a large EHS program and services many neighborhoods, the organization has developed several enhancement sites. From these enhancements, the newborn infant is transferred to an on-site EHS program offering the home-based option at first, and then center-based services depending upon availability so that the mom can return to work. Our group socialization and other education services empower the new parents toward self-actualization. There are also exercise classes, childbirth education, infant massage sessions, focus groups, and many other offerings that meet the needs of pregnant women and mothers of newborns in the communities of Boro Park and Williamsburg where these enhanced holistic services are located. In other locations, the EHS expectant mothers already have an older sibling in center-based Head Start settings, so the EHS expectant mother is now being offered EHS services for the soon-to-be sibling in this growing family.