Effective Home Visiting Training: Key Principles and Findings to Guide Training Developers and Evaluators.

Purpose Home visiting programs have produced inconsistent outcomes. One challenge for the field is the design and implementation of effective training to support home visiting staff. In part due to a lack of formal training, most home visitors need to develop the majority of their skills on the job. Home visitors typically receive training in their agency's specific model (e.g., HFA, NFP) and, if applicable, curriculum. Increasingly, states and other home visiting systems are developing and/or coordinating more extensive training and support systems beyond model-specific and curricula trainings. To help guide these training efforts and future evaluations of them, this paper reviews research on effective training, particularly principles of training transfer and adult learning. Description Our review summarizes several meta-analyses, reviews, and more recent publications on training transfer and adult learning principles. Assessment Effective training involves not only the introduction and modeling of concepts and skills but also the practice of, evaluation of, and reflection upon these skills. Further, ongoing encouragement of, reward for, and reflection upon use of these skills, particularly by a home visitor's supervisor, are critical for the home visitor's continued use of these skills with families. Conclusion Application of principles of adult learning and training transfer to home visiting training will likely lead to greater transfer of skills from the training environment to work with families. The involvement of both home visitors and their supervisors in training is likely important for this transfer to occur.

A cultural understanding of Chinese immigrant mothers' feeding practices. A qualitative study.

Differences in parental feeding practices revealed across and within different ethnic/cultural groups indicate that cultural examinations of feeding practices in understudied non-European-American populations require urgent attention. China ranks as the second largest source country for children in foreign-born U.S. households. Contrary to the stereotype of slender Asians, Chinese-American young children are at high risk for obesity but have not received sufficient attention from researchers and practitioners dealing with parental feeding practices and childhood obesity. The present study aimed to understand food-related parenting practices among Chinese immigrants in the U.S. using qualitative focus groups. Twenty-two mothers with preschool aged children participated in a discussion regarding parent-child food-related interactions and feeding practices. A thematic approach was adopted to analyze the focus group data following five stages of framework analysis. Thirteen key themes of feeding practices were identified, including 9 that are in existing feeding measures (pre-exiting practices) and 4 practices that have not been documented or emphasized in previous feeding measures (culturally-emphasized practices), including regulating healthy routines and food energy, spoon-feeding, using social comparison to pressure the child to eat, and making an effort to prepare/cook specific foods. Through the use of an emic approach and meaning-centered evidence, the complexities of parent-child interactions and unique nuances of parental feeding in this understudied population were revealed. Our findings can guide future development of culturally-appropriate measurement and inform intervention programs to promote the healthy development of Chinese-American children.