Abstract
This chapter describes the Research-based, Developmentally Informed Parent (REDI-P) home visiting program that was designed to support families of 4-year-old children attending Head Start through the transition into kindergarten. In REDI-P parents are provided with learning materials to use at home and coached in strategies to support child skill development in the dual domains of language-emergent literacy skills and social-emotional learning. A randomized trial documented significant benefits for children in kindergarten in areas of academic performance and social competence, and these benefits were sustained through third grade. Parents increased positive interactions and conversations with their children and reported higher academic expectations. By third grade, parents reported fewer child problems at home and less parenting stress. In addition to describing the program and its outcomes, this chapter describes links between initial program response (program engagement and intervention-related improvements in targeted competencies in kindergarten) and sustained benefits evident 2–4 years later, revealing the potential mechanisms of action and key factors that may account for the long-term benefits of parent engagement efforts at school entry. Implications of this research for the scaling of REDI-P and future design of similar family engagement programs are described, along with recommendations for next steps in this important area of research.
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Acknowledgments
This project was supported by National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Grant HD046064. We greatly appreciate the cooperation of our partners in this project: the parents, students, teachers, and program personnel of the Head Start programs of Huntingdon, Blair, and York counties in Pennsylvania and of the school districts that participated in the follow-up study. In addition, this work reflects the particular efforts and talents of Gloria Rhule and Julia Gest, who contributed to the home visiting program development and served as program supervisors.
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Bierman, K.L., Nix, R.L., Welsh, J.A., Heinrichs, B.S., Loughlin-Presnal, J.E., McDoniel, M.E. (2022). The REDI-Parent Program: Enhancing the School Success of Children from Low-Income Families. In: Bierman, K.L., Sheridan, S.M. (eds) Family-School Partnerships During the Early School Years. Research on Family-School Partnerships. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74617-9_3
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