Improving Access to Early Parent Education and Support

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): During the first 3 years, children's long-term developmental trajectories are established, and the quality of parenting the child receives on a daily basis profoundly influences these trajectories. The transition to parenthood is a difficult one for many parents, however, and can lead to parental stress and social isolation and to lack of parenting competence and confidence. These difficulties can then interfere with optimal social, emotional, and cognitive development in the infant and can increase risk for child maltreatment. The high cost and limited reach of home visiting and group-based parenting programs for families of infants means that most new families receive no services at all. Self-administered parenting programs offer an attractive alternative for the general population of families, including those at moderate risk. They are typically low in cost, overcome barriers to attendance at parenting groups, and have shown promising effects in increasing parents' knowledge, confidence, and skill, and in reducing their stress. Little attention has been paid, however, to the potential value of low-cost, self-administered, interactive multimedia approaches for parents of infants and toddlers. We propose to develop and evaluate an interactive video email service (IVES) for parents of infants and toddlers (IVES for the First 3 Years) that integrates automated email, video streaming, and interactive website technologies to deliver frequent, ongoing parent education and support services to parents of young children. The program will involve a series of attractive email messages that provide educational content as well as links to (a) video vignettes that model targeted skills for each topic and (b) an interactive website where parents can interact with other parents for social support, self-assess, access additional home practice activities, and access archives of topics. In Phase 1, we propose to develop and evaluate the feasibility of a 3-month prototype for parents of infants (IVES for Infants). We will evaluate the feasibility (i.e. efficacy, consumer satisfaction, and usage) of this program in a randomized controlled trial with 80 mothers of first-born infants. Mothers will be randomized to receive IVES for Infants immediately or to wait 4 months. Measures of mothers' knowledge, skills, adjustment, and social support will be obtained at baseline and at post-test, as well as measures of mothers' program satisfaction and usage. We will examine the efficacy of IVES for Infants in improving mothers' parenting knowledge, skills, social support, self- efficacy, stress, and pleasure in parenting relative to the waitlist control condition, as well as potential moderators of these effects, such as child temperament, maternal depression, and income. We will also examine the degree to which mothers use the program and are satisfied with its appeal, usefulness, relevance, and usability. This innovative IVES approach has the potential to bring evidence-based parent education and support to a broad population of new parents who would otherwise receive no services, thereby potentially increasing the prevalence of family well-being.