Session: Promoting Child Well-Being By Supporting Families and the Early Childhood Workforce (Society for Prevention Research 23rd Annual Meeting)

The first poster describes a study that tested an expansion of the California mental health care system for young children, which added a relationship-focused intervention component. The results indicated that current treatment models could be enhanced by this added intervention component as it serves to improve not only the child’s mental health, but overall development and parenting stress. The second study’s goal is to increase the capacity of Early Head Start home visitors to identity risk for maltreatment. This study employed semi-structured interviews to capture home visitors’ conceptualizations of maltreatment as well as capacity for responding to risks for maltreatment. The findings from this study implicate training practices for home visitors focused on reducing children’s exposure to risk factors for maltreatment. The third study highlights barriers and pathways to successful collaboration between Part C Early Intervention services and child welfare systems. Specifically, this study identified strengths and weaknesses at a systems level, so as to improve the quality of services that children receive through interagency collaboration. The fourth study evaluated the impact of programmatic philosophies within an evidenced-based child maltreatment program on the fidelity of the implementation of evidenced-based strategies. This study’s focus on the adoption and acceptance of a program among its providers indicated that adhering to evidence-based practices is multiply determined; that is, cultural differences, provider age and provider attitude impact implementation quality. The fifth study examined the strength of the relationship between educational attainment and childcare provider quality among home-based care providers. Semi-structured interviews indicated that policymakers and providers differ in their conceptualizations of quality in early childhood education. Quantitative analyses will further elucidate this relationship.

The five studies consider system-level and provider-level successes and pitfalls that belie each of these early childhood systems. Each of these studies is poised to provide concrete recommendations to current service providers as well as the systems within which they work to improve the safety and well-being of young children.