Benefits of a Parent Education and Support Program in the First Three Years

Abstract

The family support movement (Zigler & Black, 1989) points to an increasing need among all American families for support, advice, and role models Weissbourd & Kagan, 1989). Consequently, many parent education and support programs have encouraged the participation of all families, without regard to specified risk. By targeting all families, rather than low-income or otherwise at-risk groups, parent education and family support programs have achieved the broad-based backing necessary to underwrite statewide programs such as those in Minnesota and Missouri (Weiss, 1989). However, particularly in times of severe financial constraints, evaluations of community-based family support and education programs are essential to determine what works, how it works, and for whom it works. This study describes an evaluation of a parent education and support program offered to all parents of newborn children regardless of socioeconomic status in three independent school districts. Potential benefits to the parents and the children were examined longitudinally over the 3-year course of the program. The Context The Parents As Teachers (PAT) program was first implemented in Texas in three pilot sites. The Mental Health Association in Texas requested an outside evaluation of the pilot sites, thus providing an opportunity to study outcomes of this community-based parent education and support program. The PAT curriculum, originally based on the work of Burton White (White, 1990), focuses on educating and supporting parents as their child's first and most influential teacher in language, cognitive, social-emotional, and motor development. The heart of the program is the home visit, in which educators provide information and guidance to parents to enhance the child's physical, social, and intellectual development. In these personalized home visits, the parent educators, who are certified by to the PAT National Center, are required to follow a curriculum of developmental learning activities, model the activities with the child, and discuss age-appropriate expectations, parenting issues, and practices. Although the parent educators follow the same curriculum with each family, they are trained to individualize their strategies to suit each family's needs. Parent educators emphasize the parents' role as the primary decision makers for their children. In addition to the home visits, the PAT program involves parents in group meetings with other parents to share parenting experiences and other topics of interest. A purpose of these group meetings, as well as the home visits, is to reduce the stress and increase the pleasures of parenting. The program also includes periodic screening of the children in general development, language, hearing, and vision. Finally, the PAT educators are prepared to refer families to other community services, if needs for services beyond those offered by PAT become evident. The programs are typically sponsored by school districts, and thus strengthen parents' support and awareness of the schools within their community before their children actually reach school age. PAT programs have also been adapted for sponsorship and delivery in some corporate day care centers. Based on a nondeficit model of service delivery, the program assumes that most, if not all, parents benefit from informal and formal support systems for child rearing (Powell, 1988). Thus, when initiated in three pilot sites in Texas, the PAT program was open to all families with children from 0 to 3 years of age, regardless of specific need; emphasis was placed on recruiting parents of newborns who planned to stay with the program over its 3-year duration. Methodological Concerns There are multiple challenges associated with conducting evaluation studies of parent education and support programs (Gray & Wandersman, 1980; Seitz, 1987), including translating the goals of the program into researchable questions, the use of comparison groups, sample size, and sample attrition when assessing long-term intervention. …