A Family Perspective on Home Visiting Programs (pdf)

During the past 25 to 30 years, family professionals have been investigating and designing intervention programs that would help parents deal with the demands and stress of parenting. One recent intervention that has been gaining more interest is using home visits as a mechanism to provide families with support in care taking, parent education, and parent empowerment. In light of positive research results of home visiting, in 1991 the U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect recommended a universal home visiting program to prevent child abuse and neglect (Krugman, 1993). The family impact analysis is a useful tool in examining the potential success and pitfalls of programs directly servicing families. Home visiting programs are implemented in families’ homes and many models include in their objectives helping parents achieve their goals, strengthening parental commitment to children, and enhancing the well-being of both children and their parents. Before taking the next step to implement large-scale home visiting programs, it is worth considering more in-depth the ways that these programs create both positive and negative consequences for the families they serve. As the models widely differ in their implementation, the results are very different, with many programs showing few positive effects. Furthermore, the field may benefit from family impact analyses of their individual programs to aid in revising their curriculum and goals to service and enhance the wellbeing of whole family.