The Parenting Research Projects

The CDC Legacy for Children™ Projects will emphasize the following:

• Parental responsibility, parental investment in the child, parental commitment of time and energy
  
  
• Parent-child interaction style
  
  
• Parent as guide of child's socialization (behavioral guidance and regulation)
  
  
• Parent as guide of child's verbal and cognitive development
  
  

Measurement: Process, cost, and outcome data will be collected. Process data will allow the researchers to understand and interpret the outcomes achieved by study participants. Cost data will estimate the costs and benefits of delivering the intervention. In order to determine if there are lasting effects onparenting behavior, family functioning, and child development, outcome data will be collected periodically during the project and will continue until the target children reach adulthood.

University of Miami

The Miami Legacy for Children™ is a randomized, controlled, longitudinal research project designed to examine the potential for improvement in child developmental outcomes. The intervention program will begin at birth and continue until the child is 5 years of age. One hundred and twenty families will be enrolled in the intervention group, and one hundred and twenty will be enrolled in the control group.

Goals: The primary goal of the intervention is to enhance child development outcomes by influencing parenting behaviors through group meetings and building a sense of community.

The specific goals for Miami are to:

a) promote responsive and nurturing relationships between the mother and child,

b) encourage verbal and cognitive development and appropriate behavioral guidance,

c) encourage parents to be responsible and committed, and

d) provide mothers with a broader view of and participation in communities.

Target Population: The target population for the Miami project is mothers who have zip codes in areas that correspond to the catchment area of critically low-performing schools. To participate, mothers must live within 50 minutes of the three community intervention sites and have the additional risk factor of less than 12 years education. The project will exclude mothers with very low birth weight babies or children with disabilities; mothers who do not speak English; and mothers who have a diagnosis of mental illness, drug dependency, alcoholism, or more than two other children. Mothers will be recruited in the hospital or within one week after discharge.

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