Journals > Journal: Preventing Child Maltreatment > Article: The Role of Home-Visiting Programs in Preventing Child Abuse and Neglect
Journal Issue: Preventing Child Maltreatment Volume 19 Number 2 Fall 2009
Kimberly S. Howard Jeanne Brooks-Gunn
Introduction
Home visiting is an increasingly popular method for delivering services for families. Particularly for high-risk families with infants and young children, providing services within the context of the family’s home appears to be a useful and effective strategy. In general, the goals are to provide parents with information, emotional support, access to other services, and direct instruction on parenting practices (although programs vary in how they achieve these goals and in the relative importance of the goals).1 Many programs have been implemented, and quite a few have been evaluated rigorously, using random assignment to an intervention or a control group. Indeed, two earlier issues of The Future of Children, one in 1993 and the other in 1999, have focused on home-visiting programs for families with young children,2 and several articles in other issues of the journal have also touched on the topic.3 A number of good meta-analyses have been published in other journals as well, although some include only randomized experiments while others include both experimental and non-experimental evidence.4
The 1999 article in The Future of Children evaluated home visiting as a general intervention strategy, without specific regard to preventing child abuse and neglect. Of the six programs that were evaluated, four provided services to families with infants. The fifth program enrolled children beginning around age three, and the sixth enrolled children anytime from birth through age three and continued through age five.5 In this article, we focus on early interventions because infants are at the greatest risk for child abuse and neglect.6 In addition to the four programs examined in the 1999 issue—the Nurse-Family Partnership, Hawaii Healthy Start, Healthy Families America, and the Comprehensive Child Development Program —we also examine Early Head Start, the Infant Health and Development Program, the Early Start Program in New Zealand, a demonstration program in Queensland, Australia, and a program in the Netherlands for depressed mothers of infants. All have used randomized trials of home-visiting services aimed at improving parenting and preventing child abuse and neglect.7
