Mandated Parent Education: Applications, Impacts, and Future Directions.

Mandated participation in parent education programs is a common practice across the United States for families who are undergoing divorce or who are involved in the child welfare or juvenile justice systems. Mandates to participate in parenting programs create substantial challenges for families, service providers, and service systems. Furthermore, the type and quality of the parenting services accessed vary widely, and their impacts need to be better understood.

Understanding Commitment of Local Food Banks, Faith-Based Organizations, and Schools to Provide Nongovernment Food Programs.

Background: Nongovernment food assistance is typically provided to families by faith-based organizations, schools, and food banks. Community organizations appear to be strongly committed to these programs, but little is known about the basis for this commitment.

Objectives: The aim of this study was to examine the values and identities of community organizations to understand the reasons for their commitment to providing nongovernment food assistance.

Provider self-efficacy in delivering evidence-based psychosocial interventions: A scoping review.

Background: Among the many variables that affect implementation of evidence-based interventions in real-world settings, self-efficacy is one of the most important factors at the provider level of the social ecology. Yet, research on the construct of provider self-efficacy remains limited.

Objectives: This scoping review was conducted to enhance understanding of the construct of provider self-efficacy and to examine how the construct is defined and measured in the context of implementation of evidence-based mental health interventions.

Coalescing investments in school mental health in South Carolina.

Background: Improving child and adolescent mental health requires states and jurisdictions to invest in school mental health efforts. In recent years, there has been notable expansion and improvement in school mental health services in the state of South Carolina related to a number of investments that are cumulatively promoting capacity building.

Methods: This narrative overview examines the history of the school mental health movement in one southern state and details efforts by multiple key stakeholders that have coalesced to form a strong system for advancing school mental health.

Earlier and Concurrent Food Insecurity Are Associated with Suboptimal Parenting in Early Childhood.

Background: Food insecurity (FI) is associated with poor health, suboptimal nutrition, and disadvantaged linguistic, social, and academic development for children. Given the prominent role that parents play in children's development, FI may be associated with parenting practices.

Objectives: We aimed to understand how FI and its change over time relate to parenting in early childhood.

Disrupted Relationships, Chaos, and Altered Family Meals in Food-Insecure Households: Experiences of Caregivers and Children.

Background: Regular family meals foster healthy physical and social development of children but often occur less frequently in households experiencing food insecurity. How food insecurity influences the quality of these interactions is not understood well.

Objective: To better understand family meal experiences of caregivers and children living in food-insecure households.

Linking implementation of evidence-based parenting programs to outcomes in early intervention.

In the field of early intervention, only a few studies of parenting interventions include both participant and facilitator behaviors. Fidelity and supervision (facilitator characteristics) and dosage and satisfaction (participant characteristics) were tested on the outcome of improved parenting style in a sample of 36 parents of young children with disabilities. Results indicated that the facilitator behavior of fidelity was significantly and negatively related to the program outcome of parenting style; no effect was found for the facilitator behavior of supervision.

Modifying a Risk Assessment Instrument for Youthful Offenders.

High rates of incarceration in the United States are compounded by high rates of recidivism and prison return. One solution is more accurate identification of individual prisoner risks and needs to promote offender rehabilitation and successful community re-entry; this is particularly important for youthful offenders who developmentally are in late adolescence or early adulthood, and who struggle to reengage in education and/or employment after release. Thus, this study examined the feasibility of administration and initial psychometric properties of a risk and needs assessment instrument originally created for a juvenile justice population (the Global Risk Assessment Device or GRAD) with 895 male youthful offenders in one adult correctional system.

Addendum to "Population-Based Prevention of Child Maltreatment: The U.S. Triple P System Population Trial".

A previous article published several years ago (Prinz et al. Prevention Science, 10, 1-12, 2009) described the main results of a place-randomized-design study focused on the prevention of child-maltreatment-related outcomes at a population level through the implementation of a multilevel system of parenting and family support (the Triple P-Positive Parenting Program). The current report, prepared at the encouragement of the journal, provides additional details about procedures, measures, and design-related decisions, presents an additional analysis of the main outcome variables, and poses questions about the study and its implications.

Prevention of behavior problems in a selected population: Stepping stones triple P for parents of young children with disabilities.

Because young children with disabilities are at elevated risk for development of challenging behaviors, and caregivers of these children typically lack access to evidence-based parenting interventions, two randomized trials were conducted to examine the impact of an evidence-based parenting intervention, Stepping Stones Triple P (SSTP), as a selective preventive intervention. Both studies targeted parents of children under two with a variety of disabilities who were enrolled in the IDEA Part C Early Intervention (EI) system in one state. SSTP was delivered in family homes.

Behavioral kernels and brief interventions: teaching parents effective behavior management strategies.

Reducing the high prevalence of emotional and behavioral problems among youth requires that parents be given access to high-quality, effective parenting supports and interventions. Recently developed brief parenting interventions can be delivered without stigma in primary health care and other settings by a range of professionals.

Positive parenting practices associated with subsequent childhood weight change.

We aimed to identify positive parenting practices that set children on differential weight-trajectories. Parenting practices studied were cognitively stimulating activities, limit-setting, disciplinary practices, and parent warmth. Data from two U.

Facilitators and barriers to implementation of an evidence-based parenting intervention to prevent child maltreatment: the Triple P-Positive Parenting Program.

The prevention of child maltreatment via parenting interventions requires implementation on a broad scale, which is facilitated by drawing on a multidisciplinary array of service workers located in multiple settings. This underscores the importance of understanding factors that impact worker implementation of evidenced-based parenting and family support interventions. This study involved structured interviews with 174 service providers from several disciplines who had been trained previously in the delivery of the Triple P-Positive Parenting Program.

Natural experiment in deviant peer exposure and youth recidivism.

Little empirical data exist addressing potential iatrogenic effects of placing youth in juvenile justice settings. We took advantage of a natural experiment in one state where juvenile offenders are evaluated in either residential settings characterized by high-density contact with delinquent youth or community settings with naturally varying contact with delinquent peers. Higher rates of subsequent recidivism were found among first-time offenders when evaluation occurred in residential (N = 1,255) as opposed to community settings (N = 752).

Population-based provider engagement in delivery of evidence-based parenting interventions: challenges and solutions.

Population-wide interventions do not often address parenting, and relatively little is known about large scale dissemination of evidence-based parenting interventions. Most parenting interventions are not designed to reach the majority of parents in a geographic area or to influence prevalence rates for a problem, nor do they take full advantage of the existing workforce. Implementation of parenting interventions on this scale is a complex process; examination of such efforts can inform both research and policy.

Predicting utilization of evidence-based parenting interventions with organizational, service-provider and client variables.

Multidisciplinary service providers (N = 611) who underwent training in the Triple P-Positive Parenting Program participated in a structured interview 6 months following training to determine their level of post-training program use and to identify any facilitators and barriers to program use. Findings revealed that practitioners who had received training in Group Triple P, received positive client feedback, had experienced only minor barriers to implementation, and had consulted with other Triple P practitioners following training were more likely to become high users of the program. Practitioners were less likely to use the program when they had lower levels of confidence in delivering Triple P and in consulting with parents in general, had difficulties in incorporating Triple P into their work, and where there was low workplace support.

Population-based prevention of child maltreatment: the U.S. Triple p system population trial.

The prevention of child maltreatment necessitates a public health approach. In the U.S.

"The Costs of a Public Health Infrastructure for Delivering Parenting and Family Support".

Objectives: To estimate the costs of building a public health infrastructure for delivering a population-wide evidence-based multi-level system of parenting interventions to strengthen parenting; reduce risk for child maltreatment and coercive parenting practices; and reduce the prevalence of early child behavioral and emotional problems.

Methods: Using data from 9 South Carolina counties, this study examines the costs to service agencies of training a wide range of providers. Using data on the number of children and families served, the paper estimates the total costs of training providers sufficient to treat all children and families in a hypothetical community.