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GRAY This paper will describe some of the work we have been doing over the years with parents at Peabody College, now in the Demonstration and Research Center for Early Education, and before that, in the Early Training Project. Specifically, I shall report on certain studies which have used a procedure based on visits to the home, and shall try to pull out from these some general threads which characterize the particular approach which we use. Our approach is far from unique. It does have a certain flavor of its own, however, and it is that flavor which I shall attempt to describe. Our first entry into the field of home visiting was rather casual in inception. In the Early Training Project (Gray & Klaus, 1970), which Rupert Klaus and I began in 1961, we provided for the children with whom we were working, an intensive program for ten weeks during the summer. This program was planned to extend through three summers beginning at age three and one half. Because we were well aware that much forgetting could take place when the child was sent back for nine and a half months to the limited environment from which he came, we planned a bridge from one summer to the next. We met with the children once a month on Saturday mornings; we sent monthly newsletters to the parents. Our most important step, however, was the introduction of a home visiting program. In this endeavor, a skilled individual, with preschool and social-work training, met in the home with each mother for approximately an hour a week. She brought materials, and showed the mother how to use them effectively with the child. We had one interesting and unexpected finding. At the home visitor's suggestion we tested the younger siblings of the children with whom we had been working and compared them to younger siblings in the local and distant control groups we had set up for our study. Here we found that the younger siblings of the more extensive experimental treatment showed IQs approximately 13 points higher than those in the two control groups. Because of this finding, our next study under the direction of James O. Miller and Barbara Gilmer, was one in which we tried systematically to separate possible effects of a home visiting program from those of an assembled program. Our earlier study had confounded the two. This second study, now in the follow-up stage, involved three differential treatments for the children. In one group the children were enrolled for two and one-half years in a special program every day for forty weeks a year. This was in the years just prior to entrance to first grade. There was no particular attention given to the parents. In fact, *Demonstration and Research Center for Early Education, John F. Kennedy Center, George Peabody College, Nashville, Tenn. we did as little as might be considered decent with this particular group. In the second group, the children came to a specially planned preschool in the same fashion as the first group; in addition the mothers were involved once a week in a carefully scheduled sequence of training experiences. These activities were designed to enable the mothers to take on some of the functions of the assistant teachers in the assembled preschool and also to work more effectively with their young children. There was a third group in which no one came to an assembled program but in which there were weekly home visits during the year. The whole study is a massive one and the findings are highly complex. There are three very interesting findings, however, that I will mention briefly. With the so-called target-aged children, the age group with which we worked in the assembled preschool, the additional involvement of the mother did not increase the children's performance on usual tests of intellectual ability. Both groups, however, were superior to the home visitor group and to a comparison group that functioned roughly as a control group. With the younger siblings, however, superiority was shown in the performance of the younger children in the group in which mothers were involved along with the target-aged children and also in the group in which only home visits were made. Both of these groups were superior to the group in which there was no involvement of the parent and to the comparison group. The highly economical treatment, then, of the home visits appears to function as well for the younger children as one in which the mother is involved for half a day and in which the older sibling is involved for five half days a week. A third finding which is only beginning to emerge is a difference in the school careers of the two groups in which the children met in an assembled program. The IQs of the group in which both mothers and children were involved in the preschool have tended to remain relatively stable--at least they are not significantly different-after the children have gone through their first two years of school. In the group in which the mothers were not involved, however, there has been a decline in IQ. Whether this sustaining effect will hold up still remains to be seen, but it does suggest to us that working with mothers may be valuable not only from the standpoint of immediate cost efficiency, but also it may have a more lasting effect. Two follow-up studies of this large project (Barbrack, 1970, 1970a) have been concerned with training the mothers from the earlier study to function themselves as home visitors. In a subsequent year they have been trained to work as trainers of home visitors. The effects on parent and child in these two programs are modest, but have been measurable. Currently we are working with the mothers of very young children. indeed. Twenty mother and infant pairs are involved. This work with infants fits with an emphasis we have always attempted to maintain in our work, that of making our intervention programs developmental rather than remedial. We do not yet have data to report on our work with infants, but to date it seems both feasible and promising. As a research area, home visiting, as we do it, is extremely difficult. The most obvious problem is the wide heterogeneity in family groupings. This is an acute problem when one is dealing with children under five years. There are extremely few measures that are comparable from age to age for this age span. In addition, home visiting programs are carried out over a period of time-generally eight months or more. Thus one has problems of attrition, problems of major changes in the family group, such as the birth of a new sibling or the desertion of a father, which disrupt the effectiveness of a treatment program. We are enthusiastic enough about the promise of the approach, however, to find it well worth exploring in a research context, even if it does present a fearful array of problems in developing an adequate research design. This brief paper is not the place to go into great detail about the specific content of our home visiting program, in terms of activities which are carried out with the child and with the parent. These are important but we think they are more appropriate for description in guides and manuals for parent workers or for parents themselves. We are actively involved in preparing such materials, and have just completed a guide for home visitors which tries to express in considerable detail what we consider the important aspects of home visiting with mothers of young children. (Giesy, 1970) Instead it would seem useful to list what may be considered as the common threads in the approach that we have used at the Demonstration and Research Center for Early Education in our work with parents of children as old as five or six, or as young as six months. 1. There is a common general goal in our programs that of enabling the parent to become a more effective educational change agent with her young children. 2. Our general handle to the situation is the basic interest of the parent. Our parents want what is best for their children, but are often lacking in the knowledge of the instrumental steps. If we can enlist a mother's interest in learning these instrumental steps, our battle is half won. Equally important, in our approach, is the need for respect for the dignity of the parent and a recognition of the basic worth of the child himself or herself. This sounds fairly easy, but such an awareness is sometimes difficult for an inexperienced person working in a home that is dirty and disorganized, with an apathetic or distracted parent. Creating such an awareness is often the first hurdle with a home visitor trainee. 3. Our focus is on the parent rather than the child. Our reason is that, if an hour or so a week is to have any lasting effect, there must be some way to sustain this work over the remaining hours and days between. The parent is the most available sustaining agent, and normally the one who is most interested in the child's welfare. 4. It has been our approach not to exclude any family member from the lesson during the home visit. This sometimes makes the visit difficult but we feel it is necessary for two reasons. There is obviously an important factor of rapport; often the parent cannot avoid including younger siblings. It is unfair to expect her to make special babysitting arrangements for a home visit. Our second reason is of course that of the spread of effect. Other children. either joining in or watching, benefit from the lesson, and themselves, if old enough, learn new ways of interacting with younger siblings. 5. We have concentrated on the use of easily available and easily constructed materials. We use a few purchased materials such as wooden puzzles and one-inch cubes. Typically, however, we use |