Jan Dev 2009.pmd

(Managuacontinued on Page 3) Parenting Support In Small Doses Improves Child Conduct And More S years ago, researchers began investigating whether they could, in only a few sessions, promote more effective and positive parenting among at-risk families and, in turn, help prevent young children from developing problem behaviors later in life. What they didn’t anticipate was that important school readiness skills would also improve for many children in those families. The intervention, known as the Family Check-Up, addresses disrupted and unskilled family management practices in early childhood by motivating and helping parents to make constructive changes. More than 730 families eligible for a national food supplement program in Pittsburgh, rural Virginia and a suburban Oregon community were offered the intervention beginning when their child or children were 2-years-old. The intervention is relatively brief with parents averaging about four in-home sessions with a therapist a year. In recently published studies, researchers report that those parents made gains in positive parenting and their children showed a decrease in behavior problems compared to children in families who did not participate in the intervention. Researchers also report that a family’s participation promoted self-regulation and literacy skills among children aged 2 to 4 years. “The beauty of this to me is that we are getting families who traditionally had been very hard to reach. We are getting them to start to connect with