The "Families First" parenting program is a 10-week paraprofessional-administered adaptation of the Positive Discipline in Everyday Parenting program for West Java, Indonesia. It has not been tested in a randomized controlled trial. The objective was to evaluate the effects of "Families First" on physical and emotional…

This article spotlights Colorado and Rhode Island's collaboration efforts on the Keeping Children and Families Safe Act (PL 108-36, 2003), which reauthorized the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA, 2018) and Part C of the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA, 2018). These two key pieces of federal legislation require…

How do we screen all families in a population at a single time point, identify family-specific risks, and connect each family with evidence-based community resources that can help them overcome those risks--an approach known as targeted universalism? In this article, Kenneth A. Dodge and W. Benjamin Goodman describe Family Connects, a program…

In the United States, two approaches have developed to exercise collective influence on how parents raise their children. One is mandatory public intervention in families who have placed their children at risk, exemplified by the child welfare system. The other is voluntary offers of assistance, for example, child abuse prevention services that…

Child-Parent Psychotherapy (CPP) is an evidence-based mental health intervention for infants and toddlers as well as their adult caregivers. Families with young children in foster care benefit most when it is offered along with an array of other supportive measures (e.g., housing, medical attention). As a core component of the Safe Babies Court…

When low-income women become parents for the first time, they often need support, education and encouragement to be the best parent they can be. They truly want to succeed. Desire, unfortunately, is not enough. These women are usually most open to health care assistance, parenting tools, and a therapeutic relationship with a community health…

Purpose: Violence against children increases in adolescence, but there is a research and practice gap in research-supported child abuse prevention for the adolescent years. A pilot program for low-resource settings was developed in collaboration with nongovernmental organizations, government, and academics in South Africa, using research-supported…

Objectives: To examine the components affecting the quality of the implementation and their impact on the outcomes of the "Growing Up Happily in the Family" program targeted at parents with children aged 0-5. Method: At-risk and non-at-risk parents (N = 196) participated in 26 groups in local social services. Adherence, adaptations,…

Families and Schools Together (FAST) is a collaborative program involving schools, families, and community-based partners in efforts to prevent substance use, juvenile delinquency, school failure, child abuse and neglect, mental health problems, and violence. Although evaluated extensively, there remains a dearth of qualitative data on child and…

This article reviews the contents and research on the Strengthening Families Program (SFP), a family evidence-based seven- to 14-session intervention for drug prevention in high-risk children ages 0 to 17. Twelve Randomized Control Trials (RCTs) found significant improvements in youths' behavioral health, including 50% reductions in substance…

Previous research has linked parents' social support to decreased child maltreatment, but questions remain surrounding the mechanisms explaining this association. Furthermore, it is unclear whether this association applies to support provided by family alone (and not friends), and whether it is moderated by the presence of neighborhood violence.…

Project DULCE (Developmental understanding and legal Collaboration for everyone) integrated the Strengthening families approach to building family protective factors into routine health care visits for infants in a primary health care setting. The core collaborators--Boston medical Center pediatric primary care, the medical-legal partnership |…

Youth policy is more than a mere response to the actual behavior of children, but it is equally influenced by values and beliefs of policy makers. These values are however rarely made explicit and, therefore, the authors refer to them as "the hidden curriculum" of youth policy. The study investigation explicates this hidden curriculum by…

In this article, the authors tell the story of one family's journey toward healing using the Child First home visiting and Circle of Security Parenting interventions. Parents with complex trauma histories frequently float through services for years looking for guidance to help them address their struggles. Often, these services do not offer…

Objective: To evaluate whether the addition of a wraparound facilitator to regular child protection services improved child and family functioning over 20 months. Method: A single blind randomized controlled trial with concealment and stratification across three sites (N = 135 eligible families with substantiated maltreatment). Results: Based on 2…