Promoting Positive Parent-Child Relationships Through Early Head Start Home Visits

The purpose of this brief is to better understand how Early Head Start programs support positive parent—child relationships. The brief uses a nationally representative sample of families who receive Early Head Start home-based services to examine whether programs promote more positive parent—child relationships when they focus their goals, professional development, and the content of their home visits on those relationships.

This information could help Early Head Start programs and the Office of Head Start Training and Technical Assistance (TTA) system staff choose areas on which to focus in their ongoing work to help programs promote positive and responsive parent—child relationships. Program and TTA staff can use these findings to understand the quality of parent-child relationships among families receiving Early Head Start home-based services and how programs support these relationships. While these analyses cannot provide evidence that the supports caused changes in parent-child relationships, the findings do identify which supports consistently relate to the quality of parent-child relationships.

• The typical parent reports a responsive, close, and low-conflict relationship with their child, but there is room for improvement in some relationships.
• Most programs set goals to promote responsive parent-child relationships. Some have written plans for achieving these goals, others do not. Parents in programs with these written plans reported higher levels of responsiveness in parent-child interactions.
• Most home visitors receive training on parent-child relationships. About half receive at least some coaching support on parent-child relationships. These professional development opportunities are not related to the quality of parent-child relationships.
• Most families receive frequent home visits that cover topics related to parenting behavior. Families with more parent-child conflict are more likely to discuss developmentally appropriate care and routines at home visits than families with less conflict. Discussion of other parenting behavior topics and the frequency of home visits and are not related to parent-child relationships.
• Most home visitors use a curriculum to guide their home visits. Parents as Teachers, Creative Curriculum, and Partners for a Healthy Baby are the most popular.

Analytic methods varied by research question:

• To explore Research Questions 1 and 2, averages and percentages were calculated using analysis weights to arrive at nationally representative estimates.
• To explore Research Question 3, multilevel regression models were used to examine the relative strength of associations of program-level supports and home visit characteristics with parent-child relationships. Multilevel path analysis models were used to examine whether the quality of the parent-home visitor relationship was driving these associations. The multilevel models accounted for the nesting of families within home visitors’ caseloads and controlled for family and home visitor characteristics.