In this article, M. Rebecca Kilburn and Jill S. Cannon report on First Born, a targeted universal home visiting program operating in over half of New Mexico counties. Created in a small town in response to a lack of support for pregnant women and new parents, First Born adapts features of other home visiting programs, responding to conditions…

Evidence-based prevention and wellbeing programs offer a great deal of promise to support the health and wellbeing of North Carolina children, youth, families, and communities. In fact, many funders and service providers in North Carolina are shifting towards models that have demonstrated positive impact through rigorous evaluations. However,…

The Buffering Toxic Stress Consortium was created by the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation within the Administration for Children and Families to test preventive interventions for Early Head Start families facing toxic stress, as conceptualized by Shonkoff, Boyce, and McEwen in their influential 2009 article. Because relationships…

Young children with disabilities may be at elevated risk for behavior problems as well as maltreatment. preventive approaches that can be infused into early intervention services are needed to support parents, build competencies among young children, and enhance protective factors that may temper risk. Two interventions--Stepping Stones Triple P,…

These are the key findings from the "From Best Practices to Breakthrough Impacts: A Science-Based Approach to Building a More Promising Future for Young Children and Families". Early childhood is a time of great promise and rapid change, when the architecture of the developing brain is most open to the influences of relationships and…

The increasing ability of social policy researchers to conduct randomized controlled trials (RCTs) at low cost could revolutionize the field of performance-based government. RCTs are widely judged to be the most credible method of evaluating whether a social program is effective, overcoming the demonstrated inability of other, more common methods…

This paper describes prenatal education classes offered at Teen Pregnancy Service. Outcome data for 66 pregnant teens shows significant changes in prenatal knowledge following the classes. (Author/MT)

Improving parenting practices and the family environment is the most effective, enduring strategy for combating juvenile delinquency. Describes the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention's Strengthening America's Families Initiative. Highlights several family-focused prevention programs identified as exemplary, explaining how they…

Describes the range and nature of parent education courses currently available in the United Kingdom for parents of teens. Identifies key characteristics of these courses, including aims, value bases, materials, methods, parents attending, outcomes, and evaluation. Discusses key issues and recommendations for future practice, policy, and research.…

Family foster care, the mainstay of public child welfare systems, is in critical need of reform. Following a discussion of the efforts of the Annie E. Casey Foundation to assist communities and agencies in confronting this crisis, this paper describes the Family to Family Initiative, a system founded on the view that family foster care reform must…

We provide a commentary on the Parents Matter! intervention program. Our commentary is organized around core issues confronting those who design prevention programs, namely (1) making the program practical, feasible and economical, (2) reaching a broad base of target individuals, (3) making the intervention effective in changing the behavior or…

PARENT TALK is a newsletter distributed to approximately 10,000 recipients of Aid to Families with Dependent Children in Grand Rapids, Michigan, along with their assistance checks. The newsletter is designed to help parents relate to schools in order to facilitate and promote their children's success. Five topics are discussed: (1) what PARENT…

Project TEAM (Team Education for Adolescent Mothers) is a support program designed to counteract the socioeconomic consequences of early childbearing, by developing a model for providing high-quality care services for pregnant adolescents, adolescent parents, their infants, and their extended families. The project has four site locations:…

This paper describes a Child Care/Parenting Project established to meet the needs of teen parents and parents-to-be in 19 area schools served by the West Campus Technical Center in Fayetteville, Arkansas. The presence of a licensed child care facility on the vocational high school campus helped to expand and improve the vocational education…

This bulletin describes how parenting patterns are learned and how the Nurturing Parenting Programs, a group- and home-based intervention effort begun with the support of the National Institute of Mental Health, help stop generational cycles of abuse and neglect by building nurturing parenting skills. Section 1 examines the need for effective…