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Abstract
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OBJECTIVE:
The purpose of this article by Zigler et al. was to review several early intervention programs which demonstrate a multidisciplinary approach to delinquency prevention. Each of the programs reviewed have had longitudinal follow-ups conducted by different researchers. It would be helpful to consult these research articles to review the findings in more detail.
METHODOLOGY:
This article was a non-experimental review of the literature. In these studies, children were treated through their broad environment during their early years, instead of being treated by isolated interventions. This meant working with the early parental environment to create a nurturing environment for the child, which would eliminate several of the many factors which have been correlated with later delinquent behaviors. The studies reviewed here were undertaken for reasons other than prevention of juvenile delinquency, but when longitudinal studies were conducted long after the initial program with these children, differences were found in the amount of delinquency exhibited.
FINDINGS/DISCUSSION:
The Seattle Social Development Program (started 1981) has longitudinal data regarding delinquency initiation. It is based on the social development model, and uses the rationale that if a child is given opportunities, skills and rewards to interact successfully with family and school, they will form appropriate attachments to family and school and adopt their value systems.
The Perry Preschool Project has longitudinal data on participants (now over age 19), who were randomly selected from low-income black three and four-year-olds for preschool and control conditions at the initiation of the project. Besides many other positive outcomes for the preschool participants (better in areas such as school attitudes, grades, test scores and everyday life skills such as employment), their participation in the program was associated later with fewer arrests, and were generally for less serious crimes. The High/Scope group (who designed the program) interpreted this to mean that the program produced greater school readiness, causing a positive reaction by kindergarten teachers, which led to a greater commitment to school, which resulted in better academic performance later. And successful schooling has been linked to lower delinquency rates (Berrueta-Clement et al., 1987). A different explanation by Seitz (1990) states that the extensive home visitations caused parental involvement, which produced better socialization of the children and built proactive relationships with teachers, establishing a supportive home environment and linkages to the school.
The Syracuse University Family Development Research Program had the goal of bolstering functioning of the disadvantaged child and family, using extensive contact with the parent and providing supplemental child care (4 1/2 years of quality continuous child care, being 1/2 time from 6 to 15 months of age and then full-time until school age). Contact of paraprofessionals occurred once a week, and included providing information on nutrition, modeling parent interaction with the child, and helping the parent make contacts with service agencies and later with school personnel. The participants in the study were low SES women recruited during the last trimester of pregnancy, and the matched control group was selected later. Ten years after completion of the study, there were only 6% of participants who had been processed as probation cases, compared with 22% of the control group, and the control group showed greater severity and degree of chronicity in offenses. A calculation of comparative court and penal costs for the entire sample demonstrated a difference between $186 for each program child and $1,985 for each child in the control group. In this project there were different effects on school outcomes (measured by rates of retention and placement in special education), with no apparent difference in elementary school and differences only for girls at junior high age. Data for high school, especially dropout rates, is not yet available.
The Yale Child Welfare Research Program concentrated on helping 17 mothers who were raising children in high-risk environments, from their first pregnancy to 30 months postpartum. The goal was to alleviate adverse effects of poverty by providing support systems, by using instructive home visits by clinical and health professionals and acting as liaisons with local social services. This produced an effect with the intervention mothers (measured with a 10-year follow-up), who had obtained more education and becoming self-supporting. They also had fewer and more widely spaced children, and were generally more involved in the children's lives and education, than were the control group mothers. No direct measure was made of pre-delinquent and delinquent behaviors, but there were indications that the control group boys were more likely to become involved in delinquent acts, judged by teacher ratings.
The Houston Parent-Child Development Center was another parent-oriented program, seeking to reduce behavioral problems and enhance performance of the children in school and to promote mental health of the family. The interventions lasted 2 years, with random assignment of 100 low-income Mexican-American families having a healthy one-year-old to the treatment or control group. This program was repeated for a new sample each year between 1970 and 1977. The focus was mainly on the mother-child relationship, with home visits providing information and advice. There were weekend workshops for the entire families, and the second year of the program would include nursery school while mothers attended classes on child management and homemaking. Longitudinal follow-ups in the early years showed the program children to be more considerate, less hostile and aggressive than the control group children. But later follow-up with children now in grades 4-11 showed less differences, though parents showed higher SES scores and had higher aspirations for their children.
Other studies briefly noted include the University of Rochester Nurse Home-Visitation Program and the Gutelius Child Health Supervision Study. The Rochester study showed a reduction in verifiable child abuse or neglect, which would result in a reduction of violence in the child if a possible link between child abuse/neglect and later delinquent behavior is assumed. The Gutelius Study again provided long-term support for the family, and showed significantly fewer behavior problems by the age of five or six in the intervention children.
AUTHORS' RECOMMENDATIONS:
From these studies, it is obvious that parental involvement is one element necessary to a good intervention program. Another element is the use of intervention early in the child's life, before delinquency patterns are established. It is important to look for other common threads to study what elements are important for early childhood programs. Since these programs were a relatively brief interlude in the child's life, longer term dovetailed interventions are important through each stage of development of the child. Because parenting is a long term intervention, working with the parent can cause long-term effects by itself. The comprehensiveness of programs is also important, involving many systems influencing the child. Programs working toward improving the child's overall social competence have more chance of long-term success.
Some of these studies need further longitudinal follow-up as the children enter the later teen years, with its corresponding increase in delinquent behaviors. Most of the outcomes showing delinquency prevention in these programs were accidentally uncovered, and therefore future studies need to be designed with these factors included in the design. Prevention of delinquency is only one expected benefit of early intervention programs. Prevention of poor social competence is a broader outcome of these programs whose direct goal is to prevent school failure. The benefits of these programs, if the delinquent prevention is confirmed by future studies, are greater and much more cost-effective than their designers could have imagined.
EVALUATION:
Because the details in the selection process for many of these programs were not given, statistical significance cannot be generalized to the populations in most cases. Those studies that did assign groups by random selection can generalize findings only to the group from which the participants were selected (e.g., the Houston Program to low-income Mexican-American families with a child aged 1). Some of the control groups were selected after the study had been completed (Syracuse study), which would invalidate results. Though the findings of this study are promising, further careful studies need to be designed to measure significance of early intervention programs in prevention of later delinquency in children. (CSPV Abstract - Copyright © 1992-2007 by the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence, Institute of Behavioral Science, Regents of the University of Colorado)
KW - Literature Review
KW - Early Childhood Intervention
KW - Blueprints Promising Reference
KW - Washington
KW - New York
KW - Connecticut
KW - Texas
KW - Michigan
KW - Intervention Program
KW - Prevention Program
KW - Social Development
KW - Parent Involvement
KW - Early Prevention
KW - Program Evaluation
KW - Program Effectiveness
KW - Juvenile Offender
KW - Juvenile Delinquency
KW - Delinquency Prevention
KW - Parenting Skills
KW - Youth Development
KW - Child Development
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