Padres Trabajando por la Paz: a randomized trial of a parent education intervention to prevent violence among middle school children

This paper reports the results of a randomized trial to test the effectiven ess of a theoretically derived intervention designed to increase parental m onitoring among Hispanic parents of middle school students. Role model stor y newsletters developed through the process of Intervention Mapping were ma iled to half of a subsample of parents whose children participated in Stude nts for Peace, a comprehensive violence prevention program. The results ind icated that parents in the experimental condition (N = 38) who had lower so cial norms for monitoring at baseline reported higher norms after the inter vention than the parents in the control condition (N = 39) (P = 0.009). Chi ldren of parents in the experimental group reported slightly higher levels of monitoring at follow-up across baseline values, whereas control children who reported moderate to high levels of monitoring at pre-test reported lo wer levels at follow-up (P = 0.04). These newsletters are a population-base d strategy for intervention with parents that show some promise for compreh ensive school-based interventions for youth.