In recent years, government has recognized that programs like Head Start are cost-effective investments that improve the school readiness of disadvantaged children. Over the last decade, states have been leaders in supporting services to infants and toddlers and their families. Examples of such initiatives include Hawaii's Healthy Start program, Iowa's family development grant program, Maryland's family support centers, Minnesota's Early Childhood Family Education program, Missouri's Parents as First Teachers, and Illinois's Ounce of Prevention Fund. While these programs have different approaches and emphases, they share a number of common features. Among these are capacity-building and partnership orientations toward the family, efforts to connect families with community resources, persistent outreach to hard-to-reach families, attention to developing and sustaining skilled frontline personnel to work with families, flexible administrative structures to support these workers, and provision of support that crosses disciplinary and categorical boundaries. Successful programs are adaptive and respond to a variety of family needs. In designing legislation to support services for families with young children, legislators should focus on local community ownership, the role of the frontline worker, outreach to families, linkage to community resources, flexibility in program development and administration and in level of service, incentives for cross-system collaboration, and the use of funding streams and sources of support. A description of federal funding streams that help finance services for families with young children, additional sources of information, a 24-item annotated bibliography, and a list of program contacts are appended. (AC)