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The Parent-Child Home Program

Scientific Rating:
3
Promising Research Evidence
See scale of 1-5
Child Welfare Relevance Level:
Medium

See descriptions of 3 levels

Brief Description

The information in this program outline is provided by the program representative and edited by the CEBC staff. The The Parent-Child Home Program has been rated by the CEBC in the area of: Home Visiting for Child Well-Being.

  • Types of Maltreatment: Emotional Abuse, Exposure to Domestic Violence
  • Target Population: Two and three-year-olds who face multiple obstacles to educational and economic success. These risk factors include, living in poverty, being a single or teen-age parent, low parental education status, illiteracy/limited literacy, and families who are challenged by language barriers (e.g., immigrant families).

The PCHP, a national early childhood program, promotes parent-child interaction and positive parenting to enhance children’s cognitive and social-emotional development. The program prepares children for academic success and strengthens families through intensive home visiting. Twice weekly home visits are designed to stimulate the parent-child verbal interaction, reading, and educational play critical to early childhood brain development. Each week the home visitors bring a new book or educational toy that remains with the families permanently. Using the book or toy, home visitors model for parents and children reading, conversation, and play activities that stimulate quality verbal interaction and age-appropriate developmental expectations.

Essential Components

Goals

  • Positive parent-child interaction
  • Children’s healthy social-emotional development
  • Foster pre-literacy skills essential for school readiness

Outcomes

  • Increase quality and quantity of parent-child verbal interaction
  • Increase pro-social behavior in the child
  • Strengthen Families
  • Increase language and pre-literacy skills

Program Services

  • Provide parent-child dyads with home visits
  • Provide parent-child dyads with books and toys
  • Involve parent-child dyads in reading and play activities
  • Link families to community services

Four major components define the Parent-Child Home Program (PHCP) Curriculum. PCHP’s curriculum is conveyed by the Home Visitor (HV) to the parent or primary caregiver during the home visit.

  • Verbal Interaction Techniques. Focuses on nurturing the child’s intellectual growth through conversation with the parent or primary caregiver. It promotes parent-child verbal interaction around the books and toys. The Verbal Interaction Techniques are made more tangible to participants and to the HV through a Guide Sheet that accompanies each book and toy. Each Guide Sheet is in itself a “curriculum” since it is a one-page summary of the intellectually stimulating components of the Program’s version of the “hidden curriculum.” It is a “hidden curriculum” because the HV does not directly teach parents, but instead models for them reading, conversation, and play activities. The HV receives a Guide Sheet for each week’s new book or toy and distributes copies of the same Guide Sheet to the program participants.
  • Positive Parenting Behavior. Focuses on twenty items of Positive Parenting Behavior, modeled by the HV throughout the two years of home visits. Those items include: responding verbally to the child’s verbal or nonverbal requests for attention; verbalizing affection toward the child; and clearly verbalizing child expectations.
  • Social Emotional Development. Focuses on helping children develop not only their language and cognitive skills, but also their social relationships as they pertain toward their inner selves and toward the world of work, play, and ideas. Thus, this program goal, achievable mainly through the practice of “Positive Parenting”, is to foster children’s Social Emotional Competence.
  • Curriculum Materials (Books and Toys): For each program year, the twelve books and eleven toys distributed to the families are of good quality – sturdy, attractive, available at most toy and bookstores and, most importantly, cognitively stimulating at a variety of levels. As noted earlier, the books and toys are gifts for the family and they provide a focus for both the child and parent, sparking verbal interaction between them.

Home Visitors: Home Visitors (HVs) are primarily paid “paraprofessionals,” most of whom are former program parent-participants and/or community residents. All HVs are trained together in an initial sixteen-hour training workshop and in weekly HVs supervisory meetings throughout the Program year. They are trained not to be social workers or teachers, but to focus on modeling for parents how to utilize the three parts of the curriculum while playing and talking with their children. The Home Visitors meet weekly during each Program year with the Coordinator. They learn the Verbal Interaction Techniques for each new book or toy, by role-playing and reviewing the Guide Sheets. They also get support and counsel for the issues they encounter in home visits and which they note in their Home Session Records.

Supervision (Coordinators): The Program Coordinator is responsible for the effective implementation of the PHCPM replication site. The Coordinator is typically a professional in a field closely aligned with the Program, such as, early childhood or parenting education, nursing, psychology or social work. The Coordinator must be knowledgeable and caring about interpersonal behavior, values, and attitudes in families. Essentially the job of the Coordinator is to pull together the three other elements of the Program – Home Visitors, curriculum materials and curriculum – to form a smoothly working and effective whole.

Child Component

The Parent-Child Home Program was designed with a child component that addresses the following presenting problems and symptoms:

  • Family living in poverty, having a single or teen-age parent, low parental education status, parental illiteracy/limited literacy, and in a family who is challenged by language barriers (e.g., immigrant families).

Age range: 2 – 4

Developmental Delays:

This program was not developed for children with developmental delays, and has not been tested for children with developmental delays.

Parent / Caregiver Component

The Parent-Child Home Program was designed with a parent/caregiver component that addresses the following presenting problems and symptoms:

  • Lack of quality verbal and non-verbal interaction between parent and child, lack of developmentally appropriate parental expectations, and lack of parental involvement.

Group Format

The Parent-Child Home Program was not designed to be conducted in a group setting, and has not been tested for use in a group setting.

Delivery Settings

This program is typically conducted in a(n):

  • Adoptive Home
  • Birth Family Home

Homework

This program does not include a homework component.

Languages

The Parent-Child Home Program does not have materials available in a language other than English.

Resources Needed to Run Program

The typical resources for implementing the program are:

  • Site Coordinator (professional staff person who is trained to oversee the replication site, must have one Coordinator per 50-60 families)
  • Home Visitors (paraprofessional staff who are trained to do home visits, can provide visits to 1 to 16 families)
  • Computer with internet access (to enable the site to utilize the Management Information System)
  • Office space/telephone for Coordinator
  • Locked storage space for books and toys
  • Private meeting space for weekly staff meetings of Coordinator and Home Visitors
  • New books and toys for each family (12 books and 11 toys per family for each minimum 23 week per year program)

Minimum Provider Qualifications

Program Coordinators are responsible for the effective implementation of the replication site. The Coordinator is typically a professional in a field closely aligned with the Program, such as, early childhood or parenting education, nursing, psychology or social work. The Coordinator must be knowledgeable and caring about interpersonal behavior, values, and attitudes in families. Essentially the job of the Coordinator is to pull together the three other elements of the Program – Home Visitors, curriculum materials and curriculum – to form a smoothly working and effective whole.

Home Visitors (HVs) are primarily paid "paraprofessionals," most of whom are former program parent-participants and/or community residents. All HVs are trained together in an initial sixteen-hour training workshop and in weekly HVs supervisory meetings throughout the Program year. They are trained not to be social workers or teachers, but to focus on modeling for parents how to utilize the three parts of the curriculum while playing and talking with their children. The HVs meet weekly during each Program year with the Coordinator. They learn the Verbal Interaction Techniques for each new book or toy, by role-playing and reviewing the Guide Sheets. They also get support and counsel for the issues they encounter in home visits and which they note in their Home Session Records. (Levenstein, 1988)

Education and Training Resources

There is a manual that describes how to implement this program, and there is training available for this program.

Training Contact:
  • Michele Morrison, Training and Program Support Director
    phone: (516) 883-7480
Training is obtained:

Training institutes held at the national center several times a year; regional trainings are offered if there is a cluster of sites being opened in a region.

Number of days/hours:

4 days, 7-8 hours/day (the first three days are provided before the agency begins to replicate the Program; the fourth day is provided 3-6 months after an agency begins to replicate the model).

Relevant Published, Peer-Reviewed Research

This program is rated a "3 - Promising Research Evidence" on the Scientific Rating Scale based on the published, peer-reviewed research available. The practice must have at least one study utilizing some form of control (e.g., untreated group, placebo group, matched wait list study) establishing the practice's benefit over the placebo, or found it to be comparable to or better than an appropriate comparison practice. Please see the Scientific Rating Scale for more information.

Child Welfare Outcome: Child/Family Well-Being

Show relevant research...

Madden, J., O’Hara, J., & Levenstein, P. (1984). Home Again: Effects of the Mother Child Home Program on mother and child. Child Development, 55, 636-647.

Type of Study: Randomized controlled trial
Number of Participants: 166 in four cohorts

Population:

  • Age range — 21 to 33 months
  • Race/Ethnicity — 88% African American
  • Gender — Not Specified
  • Status — Referred by public and private agencies, individuals and identified from school census lists for risk factors.

Location / Institution: New York City

Summary: (To include comparison groups, outcomes, measures, notable limitations)
Four separate cohorts of families were randomly assigned to receive The Parent-Child Home Program (PCHP) or to a comparison group. Three cohorts were compared to no-treatment controls, while the fourth was compared to a condition where materials were supplied, but not home visits. Criteria for participation were that the family must qualify for low-income housing and live in rented housing. In addition, neither parent have an education higher than 12th grade or a job at a level higher than semi-skilled. At baseline, the Cattell Developmental and Intelligence Scale was administered to three of the cohorts. After the intervention, mother-child interactions were scored by observation using the Maternal Interactive Behavior Record. Program specific performance was scored using a Program Achievement Test developed for the program. At 3-year follow-up, children were retested on the Stanford Binet Intelligence Test and the Reading and Arithmetic Scales of the Wide Range Achievement Test. Teachers also rated children’s behavior on the Child Behavior Traits measure, developed for the project. Short-term program effects included higher levels of desirable behaviors in maternal interactions and, in one cohort, higher scores on the Stanford Binet Test and the program-developed achievement test. There was no effect on IQ when the materials-only group was compared to the home-visited group. There were no effects in any cohort at 3-year follow-up, although IQ levels were near national norms in all groups. The authors suggest that the increased availability of preschool groups may have diluted program effects.

Length of post-intervention follow-up: 3 years.

Scarr, S., & McCartney, K. (1988). Far from home: An experimental evaluation of the Mother-Child Home Program in Bermuda. Child Development, 59, 531-543.

Type of Study: Randomized controlled trial
Number of Participants: 125 families

Population:

  • Age range — 2-year old children
  • Race/Ethnicity — Not Specified
  • Gender — Not Specified
  • Status — Volunteers recruited through birth records and advertising.

Location / Institution: Bermuda

Summary: (To include comparison groups, outcomes, measures, notable limitations)
Families were randomly assigned to receive either the Mother-Child Home Program (MCHP) or to the control group. The authors note that, in contrast to U.S. families, the Bermuda sample was more likely to have mothers who were working, single, and had no more than a high school education. Families were more likely to live in a rented house. Children were more likely to be in a full or part-time childcare program. Children were assessed at baseline with the Stanford Binet Test of Intelligence and the Bayley Scale of Mental Development. They also received an achievement test designed by the program developer to test children on the curriculum of the MCHP. Motivation to learn was assessed through observation and with the Infant Behavior Record and the Cain-Levine Social Competency Scale. The effect of the intervention on mothers was assessed through a teaching task. They were also interviewed regarding their discipline style and assessed on self-esteem, parental values, and vocabulary. Finally, children were assessed at baseline and at 2-year follow-up with a developmentally appropriate delay of gratification task. Only two child outcomes were significant at the follow-up: Treatment group children performed better at a designated sorting task and were rating higher on communication skills by their mothers. One reason suggested for lack of effects was the fact that a high proportion of children in Bermuda receive experiences in pre-school programs that are similar to those provided by the intervention.

Length of post-intervention follow-up: 2 years.

Levenstein, P., Levenstein, S., Shiminski, J. A., & Stolzberg, J. E. (1998). Long-term impact of a verbal interaction program for at-risk toddlers: An exploratory study of high school outcomes in a replication of the Mother-Child Home Program. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 19(2), 267-285.

Type of Study: Randomized controlled trial
Number of Participants: 123 young adults

Population:

  • Age range — 17-24 years
  • Race/Ethnicity — Not Specified
  • Gender — Not Specified
  • Status — Families of students attending Title One schools

Location / Institution: Pittsfield, MA

Summary: (To include comparison groups, outcomes, measures, notable limitations)
Participants were young adults who had been randomly assigned at age 2 to either receive the Parent-Child Home Program (PCHP) or to be in a control group. The authors note that only a small number of participants were assigned to be controls, in order to maximize the number of families to benefit from the program. Families were required to have at least 5 of 8 identified risk factors: 1) Child’s IQ under 100, 2) single parent family, 3) unemployment of mother or father, 4) receiving Aid for Families with Dependent Children, 5) parents education under 12th grade, 6) income qualified for poverty status, or 7) older sibling in a remedial program. Participants who completed the PCHP program were significantly less likely to have dropped out of school and more likely to have graduated. With adjustment for baseline IQ scores, program enrollees continued to show an advantage over controls.

Length of post-intervention follow-up: 16 to 20 years.

Levenstein, P., Levenstein, S., & Oliver, D. (2002). First grade school readiness of former child participants in a South Carolina replication of the Parent-Child Home Program. Applied Developmental Psychology, 23, 331-353.

Type of Study: Comparison to population data
Number of Participants: 84 children

Population:

  • Age range — Not Specified
  • Race/Ethnicity — 89.3% African American, 10.7% European American
  • Gender — Not Specified
  • Status — Referred to program for risk factors.

Location / Institution: South Carolina

Summary: (To include comparison groups, outcomes, measures, notable limitations)
This study compares first grade school readiness of children who received The Parent-Child Home Program (PCHP) to scores for children in the state as a whole. Child had been referred into the program by social welfare workers or teachers of older siblings based on high risk factors including school learning problems in siblings, failure of parents to attend conferences, or physically visible deprivation. School readiness was based on scores on the Cognitive Skills Assessment Battery (CSAB), administered to all first graders in South Carolina. This test measures levels of 12 objectives, including fine and gross motor skills, memory, communications skills, and comparison and classification skills. Comparison of passing rates was done for both the PCHP group as a whole and with a subgroup of children who had been referred for severe developmental delays (SDD) removed. Among children eligible for free lunches, a significantly higher percentage of the non-SDD PCHP group passed the CSAB than did children statewide. A higher percentage of African American children in the non-SDD PCHP also passed, compared to those not receiving the program.

Length of post-intervention follow-up: 3 years.

Allen, L., Sethi, A., & Astuto, J. (2007). An evaluation of a toddlerhood home visting program at kindergarten age. NHSA Dialog, 10(1), 36-57.

Type of Study: Non-randomized comparison group
Number of Participants: 116

Population:

  • Age range — 2 to 3 at time of intervention
  • Race/Ethnicity — Intervention: 4.8% Caucasian, 9.5 % African American, 71.4% Latino, 14.3 % Other. Comparison Group: 26.5% Caucasian, 28.6% African American, 32.7% Latino, 12.2% Other.
  • Gender — Not Specified
  • Status — Not Specified

Location / Institution: Nassau and Suffolk Counties, New York

Summary: (To include comparison groups, outcomes, measures, notable limitations)
The intervention group was 78 kindergarten-aged children who had participated in The Parent-Child Home Program (PCHP). They were compared to children who had not participated in the program but were in the same classrooms. Measures were included to assess three indicators of school readiness: early literacy, social-emotional development, and parental involvement. Early literacy was measured by the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) and the Test of Early Reading Ability (TERA). Children were also rated by their teachers on the Academic Rating Scale from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study. Social-Emotional Development was assessed with the Kochanska Inhibitory Control Battery and the Social Skills Rating Scale. Parental involvement was measured on the Family Involvement Questionnaire, with supplemental questions regarding parental support for children’s learning. Although the PCHP children went into the program at much higher risk of being unprepared for school, when assessed in kindergarten they showed no differences from the comparison group on social emotional skills or early literacy skills. However, some differences were noted on two standardized tests of verbal and literacy skill, which may be accounted for by the higher number of Latino children in the intervention group. Parents in the intervention group did not differ from the comparison group on likelihood to meet with teachers. However they were less likely to volunteer at school and to provide home-based activities for children’s learning.

Length of post-intervention follow-up: 2 to 3 years.

Gfellner, B. M., McLaren, L., & Metcalfe, A. (2008). The Parent-Child Home Program in Western Manitoba: A 20-year evaluation. Child Welfare, 87(5), 49-67.

Type of Study: One group pretest-posttest design
Number of Participants: 185

Population:

  • Age range — 18 to 43 years
  • Race/Ethnicity — 58% Caucasian, 33% Aboriginal, 1% Asian, 8% Not specified
  • Gender — Females
  • Status — Participants were mothers recruited between 1984 and 2005 from community settings and child welfare.

Location / Institution: Western Manitoba, Canada

Summary: (To include comparison groups, outcomes, measures, notable limitations)
Participants completed five interviews conducted over the two years of program. Measures used included the Home Session Behavior Scale, Child Behavioral Traits Scale, and the Parent-Child Together Inventory (PACT). Results indicated progressive increases in the quality of the home environment in terms of both parent’s and child’s behavior, child behaviors conducive to learning, and the quality of parent-child interaction over the course of the program. Major study limitations included lack of randomization and lack of a control or comparison group.

Length of post-intervention follow-up: None (final measures were taken at completion of 2 year program).

References

Show references...

Allen, L., & Sethi, A. (2004). Bridging the Gap Between Poor and Privileged; How the Parent-Child Home Program uses books and toys to help poor toddlers Succeed in Kindergarten and beyond. America Educator, 28(2), 34-56.

Joint Dissemination Review Panel of U. S. Department of Education. (1978). Unanimous approval of research findings, 1967-1978, Mother-Child Home Program of Verbal Interaction Project. Freeport, NY: Verbal Interaction Project.

Kamerman, S. B., & Kahn, A. J. (1995). Starting right. New York: Oxford University Press.

Levenstein, P., & O’Hara, J. M. (1993). The necessary lightness of mother-child play. In K. B. MacDonald (Ed.), Parents and children playing (pp.221-237). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Levenstein, P., O’Hara, J. M., & Madden, J. (1983), The Mother-Child Home Program of the Verbal Interaction Project. In Consortium for Longitudinal Studies (Ed.), As the twig is bent (pp. 237-263). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

McGonigel, M. (2005). Replication in Practice: Lessons from five lead agencies. Zero to Three, 25(5), 9-16.

Contact Information

Name: Cesar Zuniga, MA
Agency/Affiliation: The Parent-Child Home Program, Inc.
Website: www.parent-child.org
Email:
Phone: (516) 883-7480
Fax: (516) 883-7481

Date Reviewed: June 2011 (originally reviewed in April 2008)