Young Children's Emotional Development and School Readiness (continued)

Low-to-Moderate Intensity Interventions in the Home: Parent Training Programs

Based on a body of research that views parenting as playing a key role in children's emotional adjustment, a number of interventions have been designed to reduce children's risk for emotional difficulties by helping parents to increase their positive interactions with their children, to set firm limits on children's negative behaviors, and to reduce their use of harsh parenting practices when the adults become angry or upset (see, e.g., McEvoy & Welker, 2000). These programs vary in approach, intensity, and the location in which they are implemented (e.g., home visiting programs, telephone support, parenting skills workshops). Generally, these programs have shown moderate success (Kazdin, 1987). One concern is that the link between harsh parenting and children's manifestation of behavior problems has been found to hold true for White families but not African American families in some studies, suggesting that interventions must be placed in culturally grounded frameworks (Deater-Deckard & Dodge, 1997). A second concern is that the effects of these programs may be more transitory than long lasting (Corcoran, 2000).

"Multi-Pronged" Home/School Interventions for Children at Moderate Risk

These programs address children's emotional and behavioral difficulties at home and in school. Although more costly to run and targeted at fewer children, these programs are expected to pay off in the long run by reducing the prevalence of costly outcomes such as criminal offenses and dropping-out of school (Kazdin, 1997; McEvoy & Welker, 2000). Results from a number of experimental studies (using randomized designs) suggest remarkable effectiveness of these multipronged programs in reducing children's disruptive behavior. These gains range from modest improvements to strong gains in children's social, emotional, and academic skills (Eddy et al., 2000; Stoolmiller et al., 2000; Webster-Stratton & Taylor, 2001). These programs have also shown effectiveness in reducing the likelihood that children will engage in delinquent behaviors (Stoolmiller et al., 2000) and in being held back a grade or more, than did the less-expensive, lower-intensity, classroom-only interventions described earlier (Vitaro et al., 1999). Some researchers, however, have pointed out that these findings are not sustained over longer periods of time, and that children's high school dropout rates are not significantly affected by the intervention program.

High-Intensity Clinical Interventions for High-Risk Children

A small percentage of young children in poverty struggle with serious emotional and behavioral disturbance. A range of programs are designed to lower the risk of young children's development of serious problems in families struggling with multiple, chronic stressors such as high risk of maltreatment, mental illness, substance abuse, and domestic violence. School-based mental health consultation programs, for example, pair psychologists, social workers, and psychiatrists with local school districts in order to identify, assess, and treat young children who are in serious emotional and behavioral trouble. Clinicians from local community mental health organizations observe classrooms, provide teachers with training, and provide child- and family-centered psychotherapy (Cohen & Kaufmann, 2000). As of this writing, no evaluations of school-based consultation programs using randomized trial design could be found; however, the potential for such programs seems promising.

Conclusion

How can we explain the varying levels of effectiveness that have been demonstrated across different types of interventions? Three cautions are offered to explain variation in programmatic success. First, programmatic success is reliant in great measure on the extent to which programs succeed in enlisting families' participation (Brooks-Gunn et al., 2000). Second, it may be unreasonable to expect long-term emotional and behavioral gains on the part of young children if their families continue to face chronic, structural stressors that erode children's psycho-social health. Third, we must recognize that the economic, employment, and policy contexts of high-risk families have changed substantially from the conditions under which many models of interventions were originally designed and implemented over 20 years ago (e.g., Olds et al., 1998). Even given these cautions, however, research clearly demonstrates the importance of children's emotional adjustment to early school success.