The prevention of child abuse is bound up in the joining together of social nurturance and social control, which flow directly from the concept of support systems. Families involved in maltreatment are likely to be cut off from prosocial support systems. In contrast to psychiatric approaches, more recent behavioristic methods concentrate on parents' specific caregiving practices. Intervention efforts must move beyond the family by enlisting the services of individuals and groups who help to create the family's social context. Methods of alerting children as well as their parents to available community resources are of vital importance. Many factors spell the difference between the ideal and the reality of day to day delivery, including social stigma, cost benefit, and cost effectiveness. Continuing community support is the key to improved family functioning. Successful support programs should accomplish five goals: (1) improving the social skills of the parent; (2) enlarging the resource base of the parent's social network; (3) enhancing the prosocial orientation of the network by linking the parent to mainstream community values and institutions; (4) reducing the degree to which the parent is a resource drain on the network; and (5) providing greater positive surveillance of the family. Four major program models currently in use are family support programs for high risk mothers, family-centered childbirth, directed self-help groups, and community efforts to provide more nurturance and feedbck to families. These approaches emphasize social support and social control with varying degrees of voluntarism on the client's part. The protective function of parents' privacy must also be considered. (JAC)