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What is the study about? The study examined the effectiveness of a family-based intervention, Project STAR (Steps to Achieving Resilience) within a Head Start program. Project STAR was developed to reduce the risk of adolescent substance use and delinquency in Head Start preschoolers in a rural community. The intervention was focused on enhancing children’s skills in social competence, self-regulation and early literacy. The mechanism for helping children was to enhance parenting and family-school involvement by working directly with parents. The complete intervention included a school-curriculum for all students, a parenting group component, and home visits to families during the transition to kindergarten. Fourteen Head Start Centers were recruited for the study with eleven classes receiving the intervention and nine classes acting as controls. This research focused on improving on preliminary findings, which showed that the 33 percent of families who participated in parenting groups had better outcomes than the 76 percent who participated in home visiting. And, those who participated in both—home visiting and parent groups—significantly improved parenting behaviors even more. This research is focused on understanding some of the factors involved in why home visiting, which was preferred by parents, was not as effective as parenting groups. What are the findings? Results from the study reflected the preliminary results that showed that families still preferred home visiting (76%) to the parenting groups (33%), despite efforts to improve recruitment. Other studies have found that parents in rural communities are reluctant to participate in group meetings because most people know each other and there is little privacy; home visiting is a more private activity. The findings showed that home visiting can be an effective way to help families with the transition from Head Start to kindergarten. Staffing was found to be an important factor for outcome success. If the families were familiar with the staff member who visited them, they made significant gains as compared to families who were visited by a staff member they did not know. Also, for those families with a familiar staff person, there was a significant relationship between the number of home visits and improved caregiver involvement scores. Another finding was if families attended parenting groups before participating in home visiting, they participated in significantly more home visits than parents who did not attend the parenting group first. This group had the best outcomes over controls. Public assistance or single parent status did not affect outcomes; however,
they did find that parents who were depressed scored lower on caregiver involvement
after the intervention than those parents who were not depressed. Both ACT and this study focus on caregivers and teachers who are around young children. ACT provides parents some of the same information as the home visits in this study: promotion of social competence, self-regulation, and parenting skills. The skills taught directly to children in the curriculum for Head Start also parallel two of the ACT skills--namely, social competence and self-regulation. In ACT, these are called Resolving Conflict and Managing Anger. Also, learning about the difficulties in recruiting for specific populations, like the rural communities in this study, can be helpful to ACT Community Coordinators. ACT Coordinators are engaged in ACT initiatives involving parents and teachers around the country. For more information You may be interested in ordering a CD of the ACT Manual and the Implementation Handbook, which discusses community implementation of ACT. These can be ordered using the ACT online Order Form. Other references Stormshak, E.A., Bierman, K.L., McMahon, R.J., Lengua, L., & The Conduct
Problems Prevention Research Group (2000). Parenting practice and child disruptive
behavior problems in early elementary school. Journal of Clinical Child
Psychology, 19:17-29. |
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