Practice Profile: Early Family/Parent Training Programs

Evidence Rating for Outcomes

Juvenile Problem & At-Risk Behaviors | Multiple juvenile problem/at-risk behaviors

Date: This profile was posted on June 01, 2020

Practice Goals/Target Population

Early family/parent training programs are designed to provide families and parents with training and skills to help promote their children’s physical, mental, and social skills. The goal is to improve child outcomes (such as reducing problem behaviors) by helping parents successfully socialize their children. These types of programs generally target parents and families with children under the age of 5 years.

Practice Theory

Research has shown that chronic problem behaviors that emerge early in life can lead to later disruptive, more serious behaviors (such as delinquency and crime) during childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. As such, early prevention programs, such as family/parenting training, may be useful in preventing the onset of later antisocial, delinquent, and criminal behavior, by providing families and parents with services as early as possible (Piquero et al. 2009).

Practice Components

The practice generally includes two types of programs: home visitation and parent training. Home visitation programs usually involve healthcare professionals (e.g., nurses, doctors, or paraprofessionals) who conduct in-home visits with new parents (especially mothers) to teach them how to properly care for their children. Parents are provided with information, support, and/or training in regard to child health, development, and care (Piquart and Teubert 2010). One example of a home visitation program is Nurse-Family Partnership, which provides low-income first-time mothers with home visitation services from public health nurses to improve maternal, prenatal, and early childhood health and well-being (Olds et al. 2004).

Parent training programs involve individual or group-based sessions that can be conducted at clinics, schools, or other community-based settings. These programs focus on strengthening parents’ competencies with regard to monitoring and disciplining their children’s behavior and promoting their children’s social and emotional competencies. These types of programs also try to train parents to use positive, nonviolent techniques when managing children’s behaviors and foster a caring, responsive relationship between parents and children through modeling and role play (Piquero et al. 2016). The Incredible Years is an example of a parent training program targeting high-risk parents and children who are displaying behavior problems. Core topic areas include teaching parents ways to strengthen their relationship with children, using praise and incentives effectively, and using limit-setting and proactive discipline strategies to handle misbehavior (Webster-Stratton, Reid, and Hammond 2004).

Meta-Analysis Snapshot
	Literature Coverage Dates	Number of Studies	Number of Study Participants
Meta Analysis 1	1982-2014	78	11452

Meta Analysis 1

Piquero and colleagues (2016) conducted a meta-analysis to examine the effects of early family/parent training programs in on antisocial behavior and delinquency. This review updated the original meta-analysis (Piquero et al. 2009). Only randomized controlled, experimental studies that included pre–post evaluations of family programs were included. Studies had to include families with a child under the age of 5 years or had to have a sample of children with a mean age of approximately 5 years at the beginning of the intervention (programs with physically and/or mentally handicapped children were excluded). Studies had to look at interventions in which family/parent training was a major component and examine outcomes that included child behavior problems such as conduct problems, delinquency, and/or antisocial behavior. There were no timeframe or geographic restrictions, but studies had to be written in English.

The search strategy included keyword searches of online abstract databases such as Criminal Justice Periodical Index, Criminal Justice Abstracts, and National Criminal Justice Reference Service (NCJRS); a review of bibliographies of past reviews of early family/parent training programs; forward searches for works cited by seminal studies in the area; hand searches of leading journals in the field such as Criminology and Public Policy, Justice Quarterly, and Journal of Criminal Justice; searches of publications from research and professional agencies such as Vera Institute of Justice and Rand Corporation; and emails and consultations with experts in the field to locate unpublished pieces such as dissertations. The original 2009 meta-analysis identified 23 randomized controlled studies available between 2008 and 2015; the updated 2016 meta-analysis identified an additional 55 studies available from 2008 to 2015, for a total of 78 randomized controlled trials of early family/parent training programs.

The 78 studies included a total sample of 11,452 participants. The majority of the studies (46) were based in the United States, and the remaining 32 were based in other countries, including Australia, Canada, Germany, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Of the total number of studies, 67 were classified as parent training programs, and 11 were classified as home visitation programs. The age of child participants ranged from birth to 11 years. There was no race/ethnicity or gender information provided about either the children or the parents.

Cohen’s d was used to determine the effect size. The standardized mean difference was the primary source for calculating the effect size. The inverse variance weights were used in calculating the effect sizes. The effect size was calculated with a random effects model.