Federal regulations have set forth specific performance standards for the provision of services for children with disabilities in Head Start programs. These regulations provide state and local education agencies and Head Start grantees with unique opportunities to collaborate to provide comprehensive, family-centered, and appropriate services to…

As early childhood programs face the challenges of becoming more comprehensive, better coordinated with other service providers in the community, and better attuned to the importance of consistency of care between home and child care, the demand to integrate early childhood education and child care with family support is growing. This report…

This report summarizes a postconference evaluation of the "Linking Family and Community Strengths" conference, held in Louisville, Kentucky, in June 1996, and describes 12 community projects based on conference lessons. Six months after the conference, an evaluation was completed by 100 of 192 participants. The conference aimed to…

Smart Start is North Carolina's partnership between state government and local leaders, service providers, and families to better serve children under six years and their families to ensure that all children start school healthy and prepared to succeed. Local Smart Start partnerships spent much of their first year formulating long-term plans,…

This guidebook was developed to offer program ideas and resource aids that can help address some major barriers to student learning and performance. Much of the focus is on early-age interventions, but some is on primary prevention and some is on addressing problems as soon after onset as feasible. The material is organized into a set of units,…

This document consists of the first three issues (1997 output) or the serial "Early Development." The publisher of this journal, the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has more than 60 state and federally funded projects, most of which focus on early childhood development of…

Can the contemporary family's problems be solved in ways that seemed effective in the past? The extent to which the family has changed argues in the negative. The American family has been stripped of two of its traditional social functions: serving as a unit for economic production and as a school for the vocational training of children. The first…

The Australian Family Income Transfer Project (AFIT) is designed to examine the impact of government policies on the economic wellbeing of Australian families. The AFIT Project uses published national statistics as well as data and information collected by the Australian Institute of Family Studies (the project's sponsor) in its own studies and…

A meeting of professional experts in pediatric traumatic brain injury (TBI) focused on gathering current expert opinion regarding assistance to families with a child having such an injury. Quantitative data from an ethnographic survey of 214 parents on the effects of TBI on the family is summarized. Then, normalization for families of TBI children…

Respite care provides relief or backup emergency care for families of individuals who are developmentally disabled. In sparsely populated rural areas, center-based urban models for service delivery and provider recruitment and training may be inappropriate. Las Cumbres Learning Services has developed a model for provision of respite care services…

The United Nations International Year of the Family 1994 will give policymakers the opportunity to bring together threads of social life that have previously been treated separately. The danger in talking about the concept of "the family" lies both in its abstractness and in its emotional, religious, and political overtones. To avoid…

Since 1980, at least 8 states and more than 200 localities have developed programs that deliver a variety of health, social, and education services at or near schools. Many of the students served by these programs are at risk of failing in school or dropping out. These comprehensive school-linked programs are attempting to improve the educational…

This newsletter issue contains feature articles and short reports on how and why family structures are undergoing substantial change in many parts of the world. These articles include: (1) "The Changing Family Structure," a review of how families are changing and why; (2) "Peru: Families in the Andes"; (3) "Thailand:…

This guide is one part of a set of materials designed to support an ecological intervention system for families and their special needs children between birth and three. The system is constructed on four premises: (1) intervention is guided by the family; (2) parent-child interactions are the heart of early intervention; (3) family rituals, daily…

In 1989, Boysville of Michigan received funding to design and implement a family reunification program that could be disseminated statewide and nationally for replication. The site for the pilot project was Detroit (Michigan) and surrounding communities, an economically depressed, urban area. The Homebuilders Model, which emphasizes children's…