ABSTRACT
The Comprehensive Child Development Program (CCDP) was a two-generation program that employed case management and home visiting to assure low-income children and their parents of a range of educational, health, and social services. Designed to meet the complex needs of disadvantaged families, CCDP was predicted by its planners to generate positive short- and long-term effects across a variety of child and parent well-being indicators. This article describes the CCDP program and reviews the results of the program evaluation. The evaluation of 21 project sites and 4,410 families followed for five years found no statistically significant impact of CCDP on program families when they were compared with control families in any of the assessed domains: early childhood education, child and family health, parenting education, family economic self-sufficiency, or maternal life course. The authors conclude that the results of this evaluation do not support home visiting as an effective means of social service delivery and parenting education for low-income families.
Subject(s)
Case Management/organization & administration , Child Development , Child Health Services/organization & administration , Child Welfare , Early Intervention, Educational/organization & administration , House Calls , Adolescent , Case-Control Studies , Child, Preschool , Cost-Benefit Analysis , Female , Humans , Infant , Infant, Newborn , Parents/education , Pregnancy , Program Evaluation , Sampling Studies , United StatesABSTRACT
Two-generation programs are relatively new attempts to deal with the nation's social ills. In two-generation programs, services such as early childhood educational programs are offered to children to help them get the best possible start in life, while, at the same time, parents are offered training to help enhance their parenting skills, and education, literacy, or job training to help them become economically self-sufficient. These multistrategy programs are relatively new additions to the broad array of programs designed to serve children and families, but many have already been the subjects of fairly sophisticated evaluations. This article describes two-generation programs and how they differ from earlier single-focus approaches to serve children and families. In-depth descriptions of six premier two-generation programs are used to illustrate the variability in content and costs of these programs. The short-term results of these six programs are reviewed and indicate mixed and modest results in promoting the development of children and improving the parenting skills and economic self-sufficiency of parents. The results suggest several lessons, and the article concludes with recommendations for program improvement and future research.
Subject(s)
Child Guidance/economics , Early Intervention, Educational/economics , Parenting , Parents/education , Vocational Education/economics , Adolescent , Case Management/economics , Child , Child, Preschool , Combined Modality Therapy , Cost-Benefit Analysis , Female , Humans , Infant , Male , Patient Care Team/economics , Social Problems/economics , Social Problems/prevention & control , United States , Vocational Guidance/economicsABSTRACT
Weighing individual plate waste is time consuming and often impractical. As alternatives, two indirect measures were evaluated-visual estimation and children's ratings of plate waste. Visual estimations were highly correlated with percent waste (r = 0.93) and were quite accurate. Ratings by children were less accurate but were still considered a useful indirect measure that should be further developed.
