Good parenting by humans is so complex that most of the skills must be learned, either cognitively or through modeling. But the desire to be a good parent is driven by nature and educators who find ways of tapping into that desire have an extra tool at their disposal.

Early intervention programs are an important tool when parents lack the necessary parenting skills. The intervention should start at birth or before, and it may need to continue indefinitely if the family is sufficiently stressed. So many families now fall into this category that big government cannot afford to meet the demand. Volunteers and communities will have to be part of any solution. Volunteers can also provide long term relationships for individual children, which government programs do not. An article by Emmy Werner in the Scientific American of April 1989 describes a longitudinal study in Kauai supporting the effectiveness of this notion.

Outcomes of interventions are still being studied. Early successes can diminish with time. Logically, teaching good parenting is more likely to have better long term results than interventions directed at the child for a fixed period. Defining success is also tricky. We have already moved away from service delivery and immunizations to developmental indicators. Next will come achievements such as school grades, delinquency, and family formation. Ultimately I would like us to target the notion that, "each succeeding generation shall be better parented than the last".

The Home Start program, begun twenty years ago in Leicester, England has now spread to two hundred cities in half a dozen countries. It uses volunteers with ten full days of training. Some communities in the US might prefer this over the Hawaii model Healthy Start program.

A US government report on Home Visiting and Intervention [1] dated July 1990 is available as a gopher file (258K).