A randomized experiment was conducted to test the effectiveness of Even Start, a federally supported family literacy program providing early childhood education, adult education, parenting education, and joint parent-child literacy activities to children and parents from low-literate families. The evaluation of 18 Even Start projects followed 463…

Creating reflective, relationship-based services and programs takes time, commitment, resources, and sustained effort. This article describes the experiences of two very different organizations: the Training and Staff Development Group for New York State's Healthy Families Program; and Southwest Human Development, a community-based agency serving…

This report describes the results of a 2006 formative study by the Family Strengthening Policy Center, National Human Services Assembly to collect quantitative and anecdotal evidence that since 2003 the human services field has integrated place-based, family-strengthening approaches into their policies, programs, and practices. The Annie E. Casey…

This project came about after discussions with the general manager of the Wellington Region Free Kindergarten Association and Jeanette Clarkin-Phillips (University of Waikato) about setting up a research partnership to support the teachers at Taitoko Kindergarten in Levin. The teachers were establishing an integrated community centre (the whanau…

More than 10 million children from birth through age six in the US live in low-income families. Although large investments in early childhood intervention programs are evident, is the field fully exploiting its potential to address the diverse needs of children and families? One means of addressing this question is to focus on the efficacy of…

The School-Based Mental Health Program's goals are to identify at-risk children, reduce ineffective functioning of at-risk children, provide social service interventions, increase effective parenting skills, help families access community resources, and support mental health education. The program was designed to develop a comprehensive,…

"Data Trends" reports present summaries of research on mental health services for children and adolescents and their families. The article summarized in this "Data Trends" examines research on the "contribution of informal support linkages in the achievement of treatment outcomes" in three models of family-based practice: Intensive Family…

This literature review is intended for use by organizations and agencies who are working to develop coordinated and integrated services for children and families in their communities. The information is organized in a framework that reflects primary areas of importance in evaluating implementation and effects of collaboration. The reviewed…

This newsletter theme issue focuses on the impact of learning disabilities within families, specifically families with low literacy skills. It explores the effectiveness of family literacy programs, examines the connection between the field of family literacy and learning disabilities (LD), and offers suggestions on how to work with students with…

This guide presents profiles of 26 state, regional, and local programs that have been effective in meeting the needs of students with emotional/behavioral disabilities and their families. Each of the programs reflects in varying degrees the care value, principles, and framework developed by the Child and Adolescent Service System Program (CASSP).…

The Parent Services Project (PSP) is a family resource program which provides supportive activities for highly stressed and socially isolated parents based on the "social support as a stress-buffer" model of primary prevention. A PSP evaluation followed parents as they went through the PSP program and compared them with a matched control…

This paper, a session proposal for a rural and small schools conference, reports on a project undertaken by 166 parents and staff of South Carolina's Target 2000 Parent Education Program to assess the effectiveness of the program's design and implementation process. The main research question studied concerned what were found to be the most…

Family based services attempt to maintain and strengthen the client family and prevent family dissolution and the placement of a child or several children in substitute care. This study compared programs that serve children and their families in their home. Variances in program costs were attributed to differences in number of casework hours per…

This report summarizes findings from an ethnographic study of the Child and Family Resource Program (CFRP), a Head Start demonstration program providing child development and family support services to low-income families with young children. Designed to describe program operations from the perspective of staff and client families, the study was…

Fourth in a series of Child and Family Resource Program (CFRP) evaluation reports, this document is devoted to the program study component, designed to illustrate CFRP operations across the country and to establish a descriptive context for statistical and analytic findings. Chapter 1 describes the process of building a network of linkages with…