In this resource sheet, Dr Higgins examines child abuse and neglect in Indigenous communities from a societal perspective: applying a community development framework to understand effective strategies for reducing risks and enhancing children's safety and wellbeing. To be effective, strategies to address the problem of child abuse in Indigenous…

This dissertation explores the long-term influence of the SPARK Program (Shore People Advancing Readiness for Knowledge) on the environmental attitudes of some of its alumni. SPARK was designed for parents and their preschool children who live in a rural area on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. The main goal of this program is to provide…

As part of a comprehensive system of support for families with young children, home visiting programs help to ensure that families facing obstacles--such as those caused by stress, language barriers, geographic and social isolation, and poverty--receive the support they need to nurture their child's healthy development. Efforts to support home…

The Home Visiting Coalition represents more than 75 organizations working together to articulate the effectiveness of home visiting to a range of policymakers and stakeholders in the early childhood field. Despite varying program goals and service delivery strategies, the Coalition participants share a commitment to expanding access to…

The prevalence of traumatic stress in the lives of families who are homeless is extraordinarily high. Often these families are headed by single mothers who have experienced ongoing trauma in the form of childhood abuse and neglect, domestic violence, and community violence, as well as the trauma associated with poverty and the loss of home,…

The objective of this study was to evaluate how parent-infant music classes would benefit young mothers frequenting a support group for young mothers at a community centre in comparison to a group of older mothers. When the courses had terminated the mothers were interviewed in their homes and their singing confidence was assessed, as well as…

The Family Backpack Project provided 249 low-income, prekindergarten children and their families with opportunities to read and listen to audio recordings of 3 sets of books in their homes. Families received English or dual-language texts (English plus Spanish, Arabic, Kurdish, or Somali) matched to their home languages. Children and their…

Decades of research have provided strong evidence of what an integrated early childhood system should look like. Several groups, including the Alliance for Early Success, have outlined research-backed state and local policies that can move systems closer to meeting this goal. In fact, many states and communities across the country have already put…

The guidelines and supporting rationale presented in this paper were developed from the October 2007 "Best Practices for Mental Health in Child Welfare Consensus Conference" sponsored by Casey Family Programs, the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the REACH Institute (REsource for Advancing Children's Health). The purpose of the conference was to…

The author describes the aptly-named "Better Beginnings" early childhood literacy project. Conducted by the State Library of Western Australia, sponsored by the WA State Government and Rio Tinto Limited, and closely monitored by Edith Cowan University, "Better Beginnings" has been successful from the outset, with proven…

The family as a basic social unit needs strategic support and strength to carry its weight, relative to other social institutions. This article focuses on why it is important to help people learn to be in a family and presents the construct of becoming family literate (different from family literacy). This learning is a legitimate platform from…

Multidisciplinary support for families of newborns is critical for their health and safety. This article describes three programs at one urban hospital which were implemented to (a) improve breastfeeding support, (b) enhance practitioners' observation and communication skills, and (c) provide a comprehensive social response to the urgent…

This article is excerpted from a chapter in "Finding Hope in Despair: Clinical Studies in Infant Mental Health" (edited by Marian Birch, published 2008 by ZERO TO THREE). Therapeutic intervention with children and families is not always successful, but the professional literature does not often address treatment failures. To address this need,…

This article assesses the longitudinal effects of risk and resilience on unmarried nonresident fathers' engagement with children across the first 3 years of their lives. The authors used a subsample of 549 men from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study who were unmarried and noncohabiting at the time of the child's birth. They found not…

This paper reviews the research on youth empowerment in seven child welfare programmatic areas. A lack of studies specifically focused on the empowerment of youth in foster care was found. Conceptual perspectives and existing data, however, suggest that the empowerment of youth in and transitioning out of care is essential and should be overtly…