Home visitation (HV) interventions may hold promise to improve parenting and prevent child maltreatment recidivism in families reported to child protective services (CPS) with young children, but this has rarely been studied. Findings are presented from an 18-month randomized controlled trial in which intact families ( N = 122) with at least one CPS report were provided with a facilitated connection to a paraprofessional evidence-based HV program or usual care services from child protection. Results are reported for changes in maternal stress, depression, and social support outcomes and repeat reports to CPS. No significant changes were found in maternal outcomes by group. Among nondepressed mothers or families without multiple CPS reports prior to study enrollment, HV was associated with a significantly lower likelihood of CPS report recidivism. These results indicate potential for HV to prevent maltreatment recidivism but suggest that higher intensity intervention is warranted for mothers exhibiting significant depressive symptoms or families with extensive CPS histories.

Young children in families contacting the child welfare system are at high risk of recurrent maltreatment and poor developmental outcomes. Home visitation programs to support parenting may offer hope as a preventive resource but these programs are rarely linked with child welfare. This article describes findings from a formative evaluation of a program designed to connect child welfare-involved families to an existing evidence-supported home visitation program. The program, Early Childhood Connections (ECC), was developed by a field-university partnership including leaders from a public state child welfare system, regional early childhood education systems, and several local agencies providing family support services. Despite extensive and rigorous planning by the workgroup and collaborative refining of the intervention approach as agency needs changed, the continued structural and policy changes within both the home visitation agency and the child welfare agencies created significant ongoing barriers to implementation. On the other hand, child welfare-involved families were receptive to engaging with home visitation. Implications of lessons learned for ongoing program development in this area are discussed.

The high attrition rates found in studies of early childhood home visitation create barriers to measuring the effectiveness of such programs. Most studies examine attrition at program completion. This practice may mask important differences in characteristics between families that end participation at various time points. This study helps address this gap by examining factors associated with percent attrition for early drop out (before three months) compared to the program midpoint (nine months or more) and program completion (18 months) using data from the treatment arm of a small feasibility study of enhanced referral to home visitation among child welfare-involved families (n = 64). Caregivers who identified as White tended to leave by the program midpoint and caregivers who had better social support were more likely to stay at the end of the program. This study is the only published study to date of participation in a community-based home visitation program by child welfare-involved families but several trends identified were consistent with prior studies with other populations. Given the very small sample size, both statistically significant and near significant trends are discussed in the context of existing literature. The practical variation found has implications for continuing to build knowledge of attrition in early childhood home visitation.

Adverse experiences superseding a child’s capacity to sustain regulation of emotion and adaptive function are theorized to constitute “toxic stressors” when they induce a deleterious biological response within an individual. We ascertained presumptive parameters of toxic stress among 164 low-income infants and toddlers (ages 4–48 months) from 132 families enrolled in Early Head Start (EHS). We randomized a subset of these families into a pilot intervention arm of parenting education (the Incredible Years, TIY), which supplemented the EHS curriculum. Official report child abuse and neglect (CAN) and child behavior were serially ascertained over the course of the study. We observed relatively low associations among maternal depression, CAN, caregiver-child relationship quality, hair cortisol, and adverse child behavioral outcomes. Moreover, despite poverty and the high prevalence (51%) of CAN in this sample, the frequency of clinical-level internalizing and externalizing behavior among the children did not exceed that of the general population, by their parents’ report. The pilot supplementation of EHS with TIY improved attendance in group meetings but did not significantly reduce adverse behavioral outcomes or CAN. This study revealed marked independence of standard indices of toxic stress (child maltreatment, maternal depression, caregiver emotional unavailability) which have been presumed to be risk factors for the development of psychopathology. That they were weakly inter-correlated, and only modestly predictive of child behavioral outcomes in this EHS sample, caution against presumptions about the toxicity of individual stressors, highlight the importance of ascertaining risk (and compensatory influences) comprehensively, suggest buffering effects of programs like EHS, and demonstrate the need for greater understanding of what parameterizes resilience in early childhood.

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