Home Visitation Programs ― Preventing Violence and Promoting Healthy Early Child Development

This timely resource analyzes home visits as a primary intervention for at-risk families with infants and young children and details innovative programs for home service delivery. Focusing on family violence, mental illness and alcohol and substance abuse as major challenges to child development, the book presents practical strategies for home visitors to address and prevent problems while fostering an improved environment for raising children. Contributors offer a realistic framework for planning, developing, and training an effective home visitation workforce and tailoring interventions to fit individual family dynamics. And the book's international focus provides a variety of perspectives on evidence-based programs that support families raising children in distressed neighborhoods.

Among the featured topics:

• Home visitation as a primary prevention tool for violence.
• Developmental parenting home visiting to prevent violence.
• Supporting the paraprofessional home visitor.
• Engagement and retention in home visiting child abuse prevention programs.
• Addressing psychosocial risk factors among families in home visiting programs.
• Home visitation programs in the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean.

Home Visitation Programs: Preventing Violence and Promoting Healthy Early Child Developmentis an essential resource for researchers, graduate students and professionals in child and school psychology, social work, educational policy, family advocacy and public health.

Lori Roggman, Ph.D., is Professor in the Department of Family, Consumer, and Human Development at Utah State University. She studies parenting and early intervention in relation to children’s early social, cognitive, and language development. Dr. Roggman’s career began as a Head Start home visitor and continued as a trainer and consultant for practitioners in infant/toddler and early childhood programs. She has conducted research on early parenting and on home visiting interventions to support parenting in Early Head Start and similar programs and she co-authored Developmental Parenting: A Guide for Early Childhood Practitioners. She co-developed the PICCOLO scale using 4,500 observations of parenting interactions to develop a valid, reliable, easy-to-use measure for both researchers and practitioners that gauges affection, responsiveness, encouragement and teaching. She also co-developed the Home Visit Rating Scales of home visiting quality. She has served in several technical advisory groups developing methods and measures to study services for families of infants, toddlers and young children.

Nancy Cardia, Ph.D., is Professor and Deputy Coordinator of the Center for the Study of Violence and coordinator of the activities of knowledge transfer. She represents the center as a Collaborating Centre of the World Health Organization (WHO) in the issue of Prevention of Violence at the Department of Prevention of Violence and Injuries. She has organized the series of books,Police and Society, and the series Human Rights Education. Dr. Cardia is a member of the Editing Committee of the World Report on Violence against Children (UN / UNICEF), author of a book about murders of children in Brazil (WHO/PAHO). She compiled the module of youth violence: causes and prevention for the WHO TEACH-VIP and produced, for the PAHO / GTZ, a study on how to prevent youth violence and promote healthy development. She is general coordinator of the pilot deployment of the program of domestic visitation for adolescent mothers and their children: a program to promote healthy development and prevent violence and is also the coordinator of research on exposure to violence and its impact on attitudes, values, norms regarding violence, human rights, justice and democracy.