Nurse-Family Partnerships: From Trials to International Replication - Interview With David Olds

• NCJ Number: 234693
• Author(s): David Olds
• Date Published: January 2010
• Length: 2 pages
• Agencies: NIJ
• Publication Type: Presentation (Multimedia); Issue Overview; Interview; Conference Material

Annotation

This video and its transcript cover an interview with David Olds following his presentation on "The Nurse-Family Partnership: From Trials to International Replication," at the National Institute of Justice's (NIJ's) Research for the Real World Series.

Abstract

The Nurse-Family Partnership implemented in Memphis, TN, is a program of prenatal and infancy home visitation by nurses for low-income mothers who are having their first babies. The visitation begins early in the pregnancy and continues through the child's second year. One goal of the program is to improve pregnancy outcomes through proven prenatal health practices, which include reducing mothers' use of toxic substances such as alcohol and tobacco; these substances can impair the development of the fetal brain. The nurses also assist parents in providing competent care of the baby in the first 2 years of his/her life. There is a focus on preventing child abuse and neglect. Many of the women visited by nurses are unmarried. Studies indicate that those women served by the program were significantly less likely than matched women not in the program to use welfare, to have greater spacing between the birth of their first and second children, and to abuse or neglect their children. There is some indication that the improved quality of prenatal and postnatal parenting impacted the children's emotional and behavioral development into mid-adolescence. Mr. Olds suggests that this program's successes should persuade policymakers to fund these services in order to promote positive behaviors among children and youth at high risk for delinquency due to parents' adverse socioeconomic circumstances and lack of parenting education.