The family-oriented home visiting program: a longitudinal study.

Designed and tested a home-based intervention program for low-income mothers with toddler and at least one other child under five. Sex of toddlers and race (black or white) about equally divided. Nine months of weekly home visits were specifically planned for each mother to enhance her effectiveness as an educational change agent. Treatment was planned to promote skills and understandings applicable over range of ages. Pretests, immediate posttests, and posttests one and two years later were administered to 27 experimental families and to a randomly assigned control group of 20. At .05 level of significance or beyond, experimentals excelled controls on receptive language test (toddler), on the Caldwell HOME (mother was indirectly rated as an educational change agent), and on a measure of teaching style (mother). They were also significantly superior on the Binet (toddler) at second posttest. No differences found with older siblings on Slosson Intelligence Test. Differences at third posttest were at least as great as earlier ones on mother measures. Relationships among child and mother measures are discussed.