Virginia EI Professional Development Center Blog

Planning With, Not For: Coaching Families Toward Autonomy in Service Coordination

Author: Lorelei E. Pisha, Ed.D. | Original Post August 25, 2026

In this SCARF series, we’ve talked about how our brains are always quietly scanning our interactions for five social needs: Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness. So far we’ve explored Status (feeling valued and respected) and Certainty (knowing what to expect). This post turns to Autonomy—our sense of choice, voice, and control—and asks what it looks like to protect that need for families, especially through the lens of service coordination.

If you’re a service coordinator, you might be thinking, “Coaching? Isn’t that a therapy thing?” It’s a fair question. Coaching was first described around providers working hands-on with a caregiver and child on a specific strategy, so it’s not uncommon to feel like coaching does not pair well with service coordination. However, coaching’s real core is helping someone build the confidence to think and act on their own, and that’s just as true when the “action” is a phone call or a decision about an as when it’s a feeding routine. If coaching still feels like a stretch for your approach to service coordination, check out Coaching Families During Service Coordination.

What Autonomy Feels Like in the Brain—and in the EI Process

Autonomy is our brain’s need for choice and control over what happens to us. When we feel we have a say, our brains register it as rewarding; when choices are made for us or about us without our input, the brain can register something closer to a threat, even when the decision itself is reasonable. That threat response can look like passive compliance, quiet withdrawal, or a kind of “going along” that never turns into real follow-through, dynamics that will feel familiar to anyone who has left a home visit or an IFSP meeting wondering why a family seemed so quiet.

Families entering early intervention are stepping into a system they didn’t design and likely don’t yet understand. From the very first phone call, a family is handed a lot of information about evaluations, eligibility, and services, often at one of the most vulnerable moments in their parenting journey. It can be reflexive and even feel helpful to direct families step-by-step through early intervention. However, EI’s foundational principles are explicit that families are meant to be the ultimate decision-makers in the type and amount of support they receive, and active participants throughout the process, not passive recipients of a plan built around them (ECTA Center).

Plan With Families, Not For Them

Coaching is “an adult learning strategy in which the coach promotes the learner’s ability to reflect on his or her actions… and develop a plan for refinement and use of the action in immediate and future situations” (Rush & Shelden, 2011, p. 8). Notice what’s absent from this definition: instructions. Coaching isn’t about handing over the answer; it’s about helping someone think their way to one, and then building the confidence to use it again without you.

The Coaching Families During Service Coordination guide names this tension between instructing and coaching plainly: service coordinators can either plan for families or plan with them. When you plan for a family, you explain how a process works and tell them what to expect and what’s expected of them. It’s efficient, and it’s also information delivered without much customization for the family in front of you, which leaves families little room to think about how they want to participate in a process that is ultimately about learning who they and their child are.

Planning with a family looks different. You still explain how things work, but you also build in real moments where the caregiver’s input shapes what happens: who’s in the room, what gets shared and how, when things happen. Simple, coaching-style questions carry a lot of this weight. The following chart offers suggestions for turning instructions into questions:

Rather than instructing…	Try asking…
You will want to share X, Y, and Z at the IFSP meeting.	What would you like the rest of the team to know? What did you share with me today that you feel like would be helpful to share at the IFSP meeting? How would you like to share X, Y and Z at the IFSP meeting?
A speech-language pathologist and an occupational therapist will come to your home to learn about your child’s development. You are welcome to have anyone there with you during that visit.	Who would you like to participate in the assessment visit? Who knows your child well and could provide important information about your child’s development and interests? Who would you like to have with you during the visit as a support?
The next time available opening is Thursday, the 10th at 10am.	These two providers set aside time on Mondays and Thursdays from 8am to 1pm for assessment visits. What day and time would work best for you?
You can expect X and then Y.	What would you like to see happen? Would you prefer…? What would work best for your family?

What changes with this shift from instructions to questions is the opportunity to make a choice or decision and that shift is exactly where Autonomy lives.

A caregiver who is brand-new to EI, still absorbing a diagnosis, or unsure what questions are even worth asking may need real support before she’s ready to lead a decision, and that isn’t a sign coaching isn’t working. It’s a sign the coaching needs to be customized to where she is right now: narrating your own thinking and offering more structure with a family who needs it, and stepping back sooner with a family who already feels clear and confident. The goal doesn’t change, helping each family grow into making these choices increasingly on their own, our approach does.

Wondering about Safety

The SCARF model reminds us When a family seems hesitant, quiet, or slow to follow through, it’s tempting to read that as disengagement or overwhelm. Sometimes a family just needs more time to consider, more time to build up confidence, more space to ask questions, A SCARF lens invites a gentler set of questions to ask ourselves when we notice that a family is not stepping into Autonomy during the EI process:

And it’s worth turning that same curiosity on ourselves. Reflective supervision is a good place to notice when caseload pressure is nudging us toward planning for a family more than that family actually needs right now, and what support we need to make more room for planning with them instead.

A Reflective Pause: Autonomy

As you think about your own caseload, where do you notice yourself planning for a family more than planning with them, and what’s one small shift you might try this week? Bring to mind one family you’re currently supporting through a process, an assessment, an IFSP meeting, a search for a resource.

• Name one decision in that process that you’ve likely been making for the family.
• Ask yourself: What would it look like to hand that decision, or even part of it, back to
  them? Or, what would it look like to change that instruction to a question?
• Try one coaching question from this post at your next contact, and notice what shifts.

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In the next and final post in this series, we’ll turn to Relatedness and Fairness,
and what it takes to feel like you’re truly on the same team as the families
and colleagues you work alongside every day.

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Categories Early Intervention, Evidence-Informed Practices, Recent Posts, SCARF Model Series
Tagged adult learning, coaching, family-centered practices, VEIPD