Program Profile: Family Development Research Program (Syracuse, NY)

This early childhood program sought to promote child and family functioning, and social, cognitive, and language skills of children, through home visitation, parent training, and child-care beginning from birth to age 5. The program is rated Promising. Intervention children reported statistically significant higher perceptions about themselves and school, compared with control children. There were no statistically significant effects on disliked attributes and liked personal attributes.

A Promising rating implies that implementing the program may result in the intended outcome(s).

Program Goals/Target Population

The Family Development Research Program was designed to improve child well-being through home-visiting services, parent training, and child-care services for the first 5 years of the child’s life. The program specifically targeted low-income, single-parent mothers who were in the last trimester of their first or second pregnancy. The overall goals of the program were to provide awareness of resources to families (including education, nutrition, health, safety, and human service resources); improve children’s social–emotional, cognitive, and language skills; and improve child and family functioning to sustain growth and development in a more permanent environment after the intervention ended.

Program Activities

The Family Development Research Program consisted of two major components: 1) the parent outreach component and 2) the children’s center component.

The parent outreach component functioned under the premise that parents are the primary teachers and caregivers in their children’s lives. This component consisted of individualized parenting training and home-visitation services conducted by child development trainers. Home visits were conducted weekly, with each family before childbirth until the child was 5 years old. During weekly home visits, child development trainers helped mothers create developmentally appropriate and interactive games for their children, liaised between participants and other support services, fostered mothers’ involvement in children’s educational attainment, and modeled appropriate interactions with children.

For the children’s center component, families were provided with individualized child-care services for the first 5 years of their child’s life (for 50 weeks a year), at the Syracuse University Children’s Center. Childcare consisted of half-day daycare, 5 days a week, for children ages 6 months to 15 months, as well as full daycare, 5 days a week, for children from 15 months to 5 years of age.

Infants were assigned to a caregiver (i.e., Children’s Center staff) for attention, cognitive and social-interactive games, sensorimotor activities, and language stimulation. Caregivers worked in pairs with groups of no more than eight infants. Play materials were used to help children develop means–ends relationships, object permanence, causality, spatial concepts, and language. Caregivers used techniques such as praise and positive reinforcement, and children were encouraged to embed creativity in daily activities. Babies from 15 to 18 months were in a special transition group that offered a more varied program of sensorimotor activities.

Children from 18 months to 5 years of age were together daily in an environment structured into the following activities modules: 1) large-muscle area, 2) small-muscle area, 3) sense-perception area, and 4) creative expression and snack area. The idea was to support child-chosen opportunities for learning and peer interaction in a spatially oriented structure, rather than a time-oriented framework.

Additionally, caregivers worked to maintain positive relationships with parents. For example, caregivers prepared a daily “Memo to Mommy” that was safety-pinned to each child’s clothing and contained messages highlighting the child’s newly formed skills or other such positive developments.

Program Theory

The Family Development Research program is based on five theoretical concepts (Lally et al. 1988):

• Piagetian equilibration theory. Piaget’s theory stresses the importance of active child participation in the construction of knowledge and the development of children’s abilities through the use of toys, materials, and human interactions (Piaget 1952).
• Language development theories. Child language abilities can be enhanced and developed through parent modeling, frequent book reading, responsiveness to infant babbles, and interactive turn-taking talk (Bernstein 1964).
• Childhood development theories. Child development stages reflect a succession of positive emotional conflict resolution experiences. Theories include a focused program concern on developing children’s learning initiatives, basic trust, and autonomy (Erikson 1950).
• Theory of community organization. The theory of community organization incorporates parent feedback and interaction to empower community members. It is based on the idea that how Family Development Research Program personnel perceive their role in the intervention community is critical to the effectiveness of the program (Alinsky 1971).
• Freedom of choice for children. Drawing from the British Infant School movement, the program drew on the notion that providing children with freedom of choice and a creative, spatial environment would support programmatic goals (Lally et al. 1988).

Key Personnel

The Family Development Research Program depended on the involvement and collaboration between child development trainers and caregivers (i.e., Children’s Center staff). Child Development Trainers were a critical link in parent–staff relationships, as they liaised between families and the caregivers at the Children’s Center. Additionally, Child Development Trainers acted as an adviser and confidant on many family issues (such as finances and nutrition), as these paraprofessionals came from a similar low-income background themselves and served as “role models of competency”; thus, they could identify strongly with the needs of the families they served.

Caregivers provided children (and families) with a fair and consistent environment that offered freedom of choice and awareness of responsibility, an expectation of success in each child, and a safe, cheerful place to spend each day.

Study 1

Lally and colleagues (1988) conducted a quasi-experimental design, using longitudinal data, to evaluate the Family Development Research Program on child and family functioning, at the 10-year follow-up. This study used data on 216 families originally recruited by Lally and Honig (1977a; 1977b). Families were originally recruited between 1969 and 1971 and consisted of mothers in the third trimester of pregnancy with their first or second child, who were from low-income, urban areas in Syracuse, New York. The majority of the families were African American, had an annual income of less than $24,000 (which would have been $5,000 per year in 1970), had less than a high school education, and had no work history. The average age of mothers was 18 years, and 85 percent of families were considered as single-parent households.

The intervention group included 108 families (i.e., they received parent training and child-care services through the Family Development Research Program) who were used to make a matched control group (n = 108), based on baseline characteristics (i.e., children’s sex, ethnicity, birth order, age, mother’s age, marital status). Families for the matched control group were identified by recruiters going door to door of families within the area (Lally and Honig 1977b).

Of the total sample (n = 216), the study authors were able to obtain consent from 65 families in the intervention group and 54 families in the control group for the 10-year follow-up evaluation (i.e., the follow-up sample). There were no statistically significant demographic differences (i.e., annual income, mothers age at birth, single-parent homes) between intervention and control group families in the original and follow-up studies.

Data were collected through parent and child interviews and questionnaires. Interview questions were open ended and asked about children’s functioning in school, social attitudes and behavior, family life, and aspirations. Child interviews were conducted for 49 of the 65 intervention group families and 39 of the 54 control group families.

Outcomes of interest included children’s interview responses on 1) liked physical attributes about themselves (i.e., appearance or physique); 2) liked physical attributes (i.e., their personality or sense of humor); 3) what they disliked about themselves; 4) life aspirations (i.e., in 5 years do you see yourself in school or having a job and being on your own?); and 5) how they would handle a serious school problem (i.e., take an active or passive approach). An example of an active response was when the children were asked what they would do if they were failing a class. Responses to this question that were coded as active included “going and talking to the teacher,” “talking to my counselor,” and “finding out if there was extra work I could do.” If the children could not come up with a way of handling the problem or simply responded “nothing” in answer to the question, the response was coded as passive.

A chi-square analysis was used to determine differences between children in the Family Development Research Program intervention group and matched control group. The study authors conducted subgroup analyses using univariate and multivariate analyses to compare gender differences in school performance and teacher ratings. The results from this analysis are available in the Other Information section.

When the program was originally implemented, a 2-week intensive training session was provided every fall for all staff, including Children Center staff (i.e., caregivers), child development trainers, researchers, testers, secretarial staff, the cook, bus drivers, and driver aides. These sessions were used for staff motivation, for refining the staff’s child-observation skills, and to teach staff about child development processes.

During the year, weekly staff meetings were held to discuss the progress, problems, and strengths of a particular child. In addition, daily learning sessions for staff were scheduled during children's naptime. Weekly case conferences were also held among caregivers and child development trainers with their supervisor, and with the program director and project director. These conferences aided further understanding of the aims, purposes, and methods of Piagetian and other learning activities that were taught to parents each week (Lally et al. 1988).

Subgroup Analysis

In regard to the subgroup analysis, Lally and colleagues (1988) found gender differences on school grade performance, school attendance, special education placement, and teacher ratings between children in the Family Development Research Program intervention and control groups. For instance, 76 percent of girls in the Family Development Research Program intervention group performed at a C average grade or better, compared with 47 percent of girls in the control group. This difference was statistically significant. Meanwhile, 50 percent of girls in the control group reported having more than 20 absences, compared with 14 percent of girls in the intervention group; this difference was statistically significant. Additional findings on gender differences between intervention and control groups can be found in the reviewed study of the Family Development Program.

These sources were used in the development of the program profile:

These sources were used in the development of the program profile:

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