The Vasquez Family
“There’s so much conversation about the village that raises the child. If you need a whole village to raise a typically developing child, what are we doing for those that need additional support, especially in children like ours that are technologically dependent?”
— Jaclyn Vasquez
“We need to have our voices heard”
In April of 2020, Jaclyn Vasquez was a busy mom of two little boys in her 40s. She soon found out she was pregnant with identical twin girls.
It was a hard, high-risk pregnancy made even more difficult by the isolation, health risks and unknowns of the COVID-19 pandemic.
With an extensive professional background in early childhood development, Jaclyn successfully advocated for her own health and for her twins to stay in the womb as long as possible.
Jaclyn Vasquez holding her “micro-preemie” twin daughters, Ava and Olivia, when they were in the neonatal intensive care unit.
Jaclyn delivered Ava and Olivia at 27 weeks and five days. She suddenly became the mother of “micro-preemies” fighting for their lives. It was the beginning of a rollercoaster journey that led her to DSCC and our Family Advisory Council.
Jaclyn and her husband juggled caring for their two boys at home and being in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) with their daughters.
Olivia spent 100 days in the NICU. Ava struggled more with severe lung damage due to her prematurity.
Ava transitioned to Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago. She received a tracheostomy tube (trach) and gastrostomy tube (g-tube) just before she turned 4 months old. Ava spent a total of 586 days – 19 months – in the hospital before she was stable and strong enough to come home.
Ava immediately enrolled in the Home Care Program, which DSCC runs on behalf of the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services.
Jaclyn and her family then began to experience the systems and challenges involved with caring for a child who is medically complex at home. These challenges include a shortage of qualified nurses to provide in-home care and a lack of community awareness across the board about what children like Ava need.
“This a population where we’re so overwhelmed and there’s so much going on and there’s so much scary, and not many people know about us or how to support us, even society in general,” Jaclyn said.
Jaclyn soon found DSCC’s Family Advisory Council (FAC) and wanted to learn more.
Ava (left) and Olivia as infants, lying together on colorful baby pillows.
“We talk about the typically developing child and there’s so much conversation about the village that raises the child. If you need a whole village to raise a typically developing child, what are we doing for those that need additional support, especially in children like ours that are technologically dependent?” Jaclyn said.
“I saw the FAC as a platform specifically for our population to continue to elevate our voice and understand what’s going on in the state, where we can continue to advocate and promote policy changes and also as another way to build community,” Jaclyn said. “Especially during COVID when the girls were born. I didn’t get to meet other families who were experiencing something similar or had older children who went through it who I could learn from. I just felt it was a good place to be.”
Jaclyn joined the council and is now able to share both her experience as a parent and caregiver as well as her professional expertise. She is a former early childhood special education bilingual educator and administrator for the Child Parent Centers across Chicago Public Schools. She also served as the co-director of Policy and Leadership at the Erikson Institute.
Jaclyn now cares for Ava, 4, full-time and runs her own consulting company focused on early childhood development, community systems and policy.
Jaclyn Vasquez, her husband and their four children.
“I understand where these are possibilities of intersection to create space for information, awareness, center family voices in the conversation but also raise those voices to other tables and where we need to have our voices heard,” she said.
Jaclyn says she also appreciates how the FAC is a committee that is responsive to its members.
In the fall of 2023, she volunteered to join Erica Stearns as the FAC’s co-chair. In her new leadership role, she hopes to look at ways to use both data and family voices to make meaningful differences in real time.
“It really is a great space for us to connect with others and not feel so alone on our path to support our own children,” Jaclyn said.
“I also think it’s a great place to learn about what else is happening across our state that could be A., either a possible resource, or B., where we can continue to elevate our voice to create changes not just for our own children but for other children as this population is growing.”
