Session: Implementation and Sustainability of Supplemental Parenting Interventions in Early Head Start (Society for Prevention Research 23rd Annual Meeting)

Home visiting initiatives have attracted considerable interest from federal, state, and local policymakers in recent years, and have expanded rapidly. While policymakers’ interests in home visiting have been spurred and bolstered by evidence from rigorous research studies of parenting interventions, some challenges emerge when scaling these interventions for use in everyday practice. Specifically, as the interventions enter widespread use, implementation needs in community settings are likely to differ from needs in the context of research projects, and sustainability considerations take on great importance.  

This symposium will present implementation findings from 3 projects funded as part of a multi-year federal research consortium examining the effectiveness of supplemental parenting interventions provided in the context of the federal Early Head Start (EHS) program. Each project’s intervention was chosen based on research evidence showing that the intervention held promise in buffering infants and toddlers against the negative effects of toxic stress, as conceptualized by Shonkoff (2010).  As part of this work, all 3 ongoing projects are conducting in-depth studies examining implementation and sustainability of the selected interventions, when integrated into EHS services.

The first paper presents quantitative findings on psychological wellbeing and perceptions of work among
EHS home visitors (N = 23) as well as results from qualitative interviews with a subset of home visitors (N = 11) whose families received both EHS and the Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up (ABC) parenting intervention. The second paper presents qualitative data on program adoption, experiences with implementation, and recommendations for sustainability, based on interviews of EHS home visitors (N = 8) carrying out the Promoting First Relationships (PFR) parenting intervention.  A goal of this study is to create conditions allowing the agency to continue PFR as part of regular EHS practice. The third paper focuses on strategies for use of videobased instruction combined with coaching as service delivery model for EHS home visitors (N = 24) trained to employ the Play and Learning Strategies (PALS) parenting intervention as part of EHS services.  Findings from qualitative fidelity checks and content analysis of PALS delivery will be presented.

The discussant is a Home Visiting Specialist who works with EHS as a staff member in the federal Office of Head Start. The discussant will identify common issues in implementation and scale-up, as well as implications for sustainability of the 3 parenting interventions after the research consortium studies are complete.