Head Start Readiness among At-Risk Children
Preventing Child Neglect in High-Risk Mothers
Promoting Healthy Families

Head Start Readiness top...
At-risk children often fail to profit from Head Start or other early education programs because they are cognitively, emotionally, and socially unprepared, especially in areas of attention, attachment, receptive and productive language, mastery motivation, and self-regulation. The PASS project seeks to develop an intervention strategy that will advance pre-academic self-regulation prior to entry to Head Start. We propose to refine and integrate the best of parent training modules so as to foster the emergence of a sequence of interdependent developmental skills in 450 first-born children, culminating in enhanced cognitive-emotional self-regulation and pre-academic skills. Children who progress more rapidly because of the components of our overall intervention should be "ready" to take fuller advantage of Head Start programs, as shown in their pre-academic reading and math skills, when compared with children in a control condition or those in the treatment conditions who are less successful in achieving these developmental milestones. We propose a complex intervention, across three research sites that have heavy concentrations of children living in poverty. The intervention will focus on the parents and caregivers of first-born at-risk children from birth to age 4.

Preventing Child Neglect in High-Risk Mothers top...
The PASS research team is engaged in a multi-site intervention project designed to reduce the incidence of child abuse and neglect in high-risk mothers. The project gathers data in four cities in an attempt to understand the factors that produce neglect, its impact on child development, the role of community agencies in preventing neglect, and the potential for developing more sensitive and responsive parenting practices.

Promoting Healthy Families top...
The Promoting Healthy Families project addresses family problems, including the interrelated topics of marital conflict and parenting practices. The PASS research team plans to disseminate its research findings to the South Bend-Elkhart communities in the form of programs designed to assist parents to better handle marital conflict and to improve their parenting skills. These are timely and important issues that will be addressed through implementing community-based outreach programs.

At the University of Notre Dame we have been making significant inroads in determining scientifically the nature of constructive and destructive forms of marital conflict, and developing ways to disseminate new information about effective parenting. Promoting Healthy Families includes programs that are designed to provide parent education models that reach a wide variety of families, with appropriate scientific tests of program effectiveness to advance accountability. We anticipate that our programs will have a major impact on the well being of families in the South Bend and surrounding communities and ultimately provide a model for a national campaign for effectively educating parents about how to handle their everyday differences more effectively for the sake of the children, marriages, and families. A second set of programs is designed to promote healthy parenting and healthy children by developing and disseminating information about positive parenting practices. We intend to develop different ways to communicate parenting practices to a variety of single and dual parenting families, including web-based delivery of services.