INCREASING THE PREVALENCE OF SUCCESSFUL CHILDREN - THE CASE FOR COMMUNITY INTERVENTION RESEARCH

This paper makes a case for research on community interventions on chi ld rearing. Sufficient evidence has accumulated about the development of children's problem behavior to justify evaluating efforts to reduce the prevalence of these problems in whole communities. The contextual risk factors for diverse child behavior problems are well understood, and interventions to ameliorate individual risk factors have been dev eloped and evaluated. Because interventions with individual children h ave proven to be efficacious, it is now appropriate to direct energy t oward reducing the prevalence of children with behavior problems. At t he same time, existing interventions have limitations. Community inter ventions may be needed to modify the larger social context for familie s. This paper enumerates possible components of a community interventi on to improve child-rearing outcomes. Existing evidence indicates that communities would benefit from making parent training and family supp ort programs available to parents. Validated methods of identifying an d remediating academic and behavioral problems in schools are availabl e, but influencing schools to adopt them remains a problem. Community organizing could mobilize communities to allocate the resources necess ary to support such parenting and schooling programs as well as encour age their adoption. Media campaigns could foster community support and directly influence parenting practices. Efforts to modify peer influe nces to use illicit substances have received empirical support; simila r efforts may be relevant to preventing other problems. The developmen t of a science of community interventions on child rearing is hampered by overreliance on randomized control trials. For this reason, two ex amples of time-series experimental evaluations of community interventi on components are described here.