The early childhood family check-up: A brief intervention for at-risk families with preschool-aged children

The Early Childhood Family Check-Up (FCU-EC) is a brief intervention for at-risk families with preschool-aged children. The intervention is based on the principles of motivational interviewing (Miller & Rollnick, 1991). It is individualized for each family and is designed to motivate parents to enact change in their parenting skills. The goal of the intervention is to decrease risk for severe behavior problems through a focus on parenting and family context. Research suggests that coercive parenting strategies are associated with the development of child behavior problems (Patterson, Reid, & Dishion, 1992), and that behavior problems beginning in the preschool years can be stable and persistent (Campbell et al., 1994). Parenting practices are therefore an important focus for interventions in these early years. This study hypothesized that the FCU-EC would reduce child behavior problems through the decrease of negative parenting practices and the increase in positive parenting practices. Forty families with children between 2.5 and 4 years participated in the study with at least one caregiver. Families were randomly assigned to either the FCU-EC condition or the wait-list control condition. All participating parents completed questionnaire measures and participated in a lab task with their child, providing both self-report and observation data. The families in the FCU-EC condition then received the intervention. After four weeks, both groups again completed questionnaire measures and participated in a lab task with their child. To determine the efficacy of the FCU-EC, observation and self-report measures were examined for change after the intervention. According to analyses of covariance, changes in observed and self-reported parenting strategies were found for parents who received the FCU-EC intervention. In particular, parents in the intervention group were observed to use more structure with their children in parent-child tasks than parents in the control condition. Scores on self-report measures of parental verbosity and permissiveness also decreased in accordance with the hypotheses. The influence of depression on treatment efficacy and parent-child relationships is also discussed, as mothers in study reported moderate to high levels of depression. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)