Although some home visiting programs have proven effective with the families they serve, no program has yet demonstrated broader impact on an entire county or state population. This article describes the Durham Connects program, which aims to achieve broad county-level effects by coalescing community agencies to serve early-intervention goals…

It is a common assumption that mothers who have had previous births would participate less fully and have poorer outcomes from early home visitation programs than would first-time mothers. The authors conducted a qualitative and quantitative study to test that assumption by measuring three aspects of participation: time in the program, the number…

A growing body of evidence suggests that involving families in home visiting services promotes positive experiences during the initial years of a child's life; however less is known about whether or not the benefits continue to accrue after a child enters school. This article describes the results of a study examining the effectiveness of an…

Variations in dosage, content, and family engagement with Early Head Start (EHS) home visiting services were examined for families participating in the EHS Research and Evaluation Project. Families were grouped by characteristics of maternal age, maternal ethnicity, and level of family risk. All home visiting variables were related differentially…

The authors describe the research and evaluation activities connected to the new Maternal, Infant and Early Childhood Home Visiting program. The goal of these activities is to provide information on federal, state, and local efforts to strengthen programs by providing much needed knowledge on the best ways to support the implementation of home…

The MOM Program is an innovative home visiting program whose aim is to empower low-income urban mothers to obtain health and early intervention services for their children. The authors discuss a recent evaluation of the MOM program which sought to examine maternal involvement in the program. The results raise important questions and call for…

As the infant mental health workforce expands to meet the needs of increasingly diverse families and communities, leaders of the work--most often, supervisors in community settings--should be responsive to and reflective of the ethnic or cultural backgrounds of those served. The Reflective Supervision Training Program described addresses an…

Mom2Mom is an attachment-based home visiting project for distressed mothers of young infants, based in Israel. Home visitors, who are volunteer mothers from the community, are trained and supervised by professionals. Home visits occur weekly for 1-2 hours and continue until the infant is 1 year old. The project was founded in Jerusalem in year…

Erikson Institute Fussy Baby Network[R] (FBN) developed an approach to engaging parents around their urgent concerns about their baby's crying, sleeping, or feeding in a way which builds their longer-term capacities as parents. This approach, called the FAN, is now in place in new Fussy Baby Network programs around the country and is being infused…

With the growing and diverse use of the term "evidence-based practice" it can be difficult for policymakers, funders, program officers, and other professionals to separate the good evidence from the flawed. Furthermore, once good evidence has been identified, it can be difficult to know how to use it. This article discusses key issues to consider…

The movement toward evidence-based practice has had a tremendous impact on the early childhood field over the past decade. The authors describe the origins of the evidence-based movement for the early childhood profession and various definitions associated with it. They provide resources for identifying programs and practices that have been…

This brief article discusses a yoga program offered to mothers and babies who were participating in a prison nursery. The author describes the goals and the sometimes unexpected effects of the program.

The absence of a father figure has been linked to very poor developmental outcomes. The Baby Elmo Program, a parenting and structured visitation program, aims to form and maintain bonds between children and their incarcerated teen fathers. The program is taught and supervised by probation staff in juvenile detention facilities. This intervention…

This article summarizes an evaluation of the Safe Babies Court Teams Project. The study compared children in the Court Teams Project at the four initial sites (n = 298) with a nationally representative sample of young child welfare participants (n = 511) from the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being (NSCAW). The Court Teams Project…

Caring for Quality and Partners in Family Child Care are home visiting programs designed to improve the quality of home-based child care. This article describes the experiences of two different home visitors to demonstrate how programs such as these can help providers improve the overall quality of care, increase children's development, and lead…