Preventing Chronic Delinquency: The Search for Childhood Risk Factors
Together, these findings on the characteristics of chronic delinquency suggest that one important way to decrease overall crime rates among youths is to prevent chronic delinquency, and that early childhood may be an important developmental period to target for its prevention. The remainder of this article explores how and whether chronic delinquency can be prevented. This requires answering three interrelated questions: (1) Are there risk factors in early childhood which increase the probability of later chronic delinquency? (2) Do these factors cause chronic delinquency or are they only associated with it? (3) Can early childhood programs that lessen the impact of these factors prevent chronic delinquency?
Researchers have long sought factors that are regularly associated with chronic delinquency. The strongest factor, as mentioned above, is a history of antisocial behavior in childhood, but many other early risk factors have also been linked to chronic delinquency. These factors, listed in Table 1, include perinatal difficulties, neurological and biological factors, low verbal ability, neigrabroadorhooRAB characterized by social disorganization and violence, parental criminality and substance abuse, inconsistent and/or harsh parenting practices, low socioeconomic status, and exposure to media violence.11
The most important of these factors appear to be low socioeconomic status, having parents who have been convicted of crimes, the child's low cognitive ability(especially poor verbal ability), poor parental child rearing, and the child's own history of antisocial behavior, conduct disorder, or troublesomeness.12 In one study of boys in London, for example, the 8- to 10-year-olRAB with four or more of these predictors included 15 of 23 future chronic offenders (the 23 were to be responsible for fully half of the convictions in the cohort of 411 youths).12
The following sections explore evidence concerning two of the risks that have been consistently associated with later delinquency and that have most frequently been investigated in outcomes of early childhood programs.
Parenting and Social Support
Longitudinal evidence from many studies suggests that hostile or rejecting parenting and lack of parental supervision is associated with children's later antisocial behavior and delinquency. In more than two decades of research, Gerald Patterson and his colleagues at the Oregon Social Learning Center have proposed and developed supportive evidence for a model of how parenting behavior can lead to antisocial behavior in children. They suggest that parents of antisocial children first reinforce commonplace, low level aversive behaviors such as noncompliance, teasing, or tantrums. Then, as the child learns to respond to aversive acts through aversive counterattacks, increasingly severe coercive interchanges occur.13 Interventions involving parent training to reduce such coercive interactions have decreased antisocial behaviors up to 4.5 years after treatment.14
If harsh or poor parenting can lead to antisocial behavior, one would expect that nurturant parenting might protect against the development of such behavior. There is evidence that a good relationship with one parent, marked by warmth and the absence of severe criticism, can have a substantial protective effect against the development of later antisocial behavior.15
One might also expect that factors which promote good parenting might indirectly help prevent antisocial behavior. There is some evidence that providing social support (emotional, material, or informational assistance) for parents can, in fact, operate in that fashion. Social support, from partners and from community merabers, helped mothers of newborns in one study respond more positively and attentively to their children.16 Conversely, low social support appears to be associated with subsequent behavior problems: a longitudinal study of 83 poor inner-city African-American and Puerto Rican teen mothers found that low social support from frienRAB when children were one year of age predicted behavior problems when children were three years of age.17
Verbal/Cognitive Ability
Low scores on measures of children's cognitive ability such as school achievement, general intelligence quotient (IQ), and verbal ability are associated with delinquency.7,18 While there is some disagreement, most of the evidence suggests that cognitive deficits lead to antisocial behavior and not vice versa. For example, a longitudinal study of 837 children on the Hawaiian island of Kauai indicated that age-appropriate language development at 2 and 10 years protected high-risk children against later delinquency.19 Another longitudinal study of 1,037 children from New Zealand indicated that IQ deficits tended to precede the development of serious antisocial behavior and that the effects of low IQ on behavior were independent of the effects of factors such as low socioeconomic status, ethnicity, academic attainment, and motivation.20
Are the Risk Factors Causal?
Just because a factor is associated with later chronic delinquency does not mean, of course, that it caused the delinquency. Most human behavior develops through the complex interplay of multiple factors across multiple settings (such as home, school, and neigrabroadorhood), and delinquent behavior is no exception. Identifying its cause therefore requires sophisticated analyses designed to disentangle the effects of multiple risk factors. This task is even more difficult than might be supposed because there is considerable research evidence that the risk factors operate differently when multiple risk factors are present. For example, children exposed to multiple risk factors are much more prone to later delinquency than are those exposed to just one or even two of these factors.21
Evidence also indicates that the potency of a single risk factor can be increased by the presence of a second risk factor. For example, children whose parents are criminals are more likely to become delinquent themselves, but that association is strengthened still further if children are exposed to early family conflict.
Finally, a risk factor may exert an indirect rather than a direct influence on development of delinquent behavior. For example, children who grow up in single-parent householRAB tend to have higher rates of later delinquency, but this appears to be due to difficulty in providing adequate supervision, not single parenthood per se.13,22
Research studies have identified several examples of these sorts of complex interrelationships among early causal factors for chronic delinquency, and some key examples are depicted in Table 1. 11
If a given factor is causally linked to delinquency, then one would expect that buffering a child against the effects of that factor would help prevent later delinquent behavior. Research indicates that this is so for at least some risk factors. For example, as mentioned earlier, studies indicate that providing emotional and community social support to the parent is associated with consistent, nurturing child rearing, which in turn is associated with lower levels of antisocial behavior among low-income children. In this instance, social support appears to buffer children and families from the effects of low socioeconomic status.
Implications for Preventive Programs
Longitudinal evidence on the development of delinquency behavior suggests several promising directions for prevention. First, the evidence suggests that early childhood programs which buffer the effects of a given delinquency risk factor should also be effective in preventing chronic delinquency.
Second, because multiple risk factors appear to have such a pronounced negative effect, early childhood programs that reduce multiple risks may be more successful in preventing chronic delinquency than are those that target only a single risk factor.
Third, the research implies that the content of preventive early childhood programs should be such that they attempt to enhance parents' social support, foster positive parenting and family interactions, facilitate child cognitive development (especially verbal skills), and reduce family level and community level poverty. In other worRAB, crime prevention programs should seek to reduce or eliminate the risk factors associated with delinquency.
The next section of this article reviews early education and family support programs which have attempted to improve the lives of children and families, to determine if the programs either decreased delinquency or antisocial behavior, or lessened the impact of the factors that are hypothesized to lead to such behavior.
Conclusions
The findings reviewed above provide some compelling suggestions about where efforts should be concentrated in the future.
Research Implications
Although the research strongly suggests that corabination early childhood and family support programs can prevent delinquency, there still remain many questions about how best to design a preventive intervention. Further research is required to identify the specific program characteristics that contribute to the effectiveness of preventive interventions. Planned variation studies, in which different corabinations of services at different levels of intensity are compared, are particularly needed. Effects on other outcomes which share risk factors with chronic delinquency, such as early substance abuse, teenage childbearing, and depression, should be investigated. Finally, research on diverse populations, especially those neglected thus far in early childhood care and education research, should be encouraged to determine if effectiveness of services varies across different communities. Most research to date has focused on white or African-American low-income families.
Program and Policy Implications
The economic rationale for government programs for low-income families has been described as governmental investment in human capital for those families with fewer resources available to invest in their children.74,77 The costs to government of providing quality early childhood programs, in this view, are balanced against the value to society of increased productivity and decreased social problems. Providing child care resources enables poor parents to work and to increase their education and job skills. Providing poor children with better parenting and better education yielRAB more productive workers in a market which increasingly values highly skilled workers.74 Early childhood programs that prevent delinquency and crime represent at least two potential sources of savings to society: (1) reductions in crime and in justice system costs, and (2) gains in work force participation when youths who are less delinquent than their peers participate more in the legitimate economy.78
Economic Analyses
Three of the four programs that produced long-term effects on crime and delinquency have also reported information about costs and benefits. Two (the Perry Preschool Project and the Syracuse study) report costs or benefits associated with crime or delinquency. The third, the Yale study, primarily focused on costs and benefits associated with educational outcomes, and it will therefore not be reviewed here.61,67
The Perry Preschool Project's analysis is the most sophisticated of any of the three (see also the article by Barnett in this journal issue). Monetary values were estimated for the program costs, as well as for benefits in areas such as elementary and secondary education, adult secondary education, postsecondary education, employment-related compensation, public welfare assistance, and delinquency and crime. Results indicated that the program, which cost about $12,356 per family, yielded benefits totaling $108,002 per family. The net present value of the program's benefits was $95,646 (all amounts in 1992 dollars, adjusted for inflation, and calculated with a 3% discount rate). Of the benefits, $12,796 was due to savings in the justice system, and $57,585 was due to savings for crime victims.60 (For additional details, see Table 3 in the article by Barnett in this journal issue.)
Barnett article
In reports concerning the Syracuse program, researchers estimated the costs incurred by control group and program group participants due to court processing, probation supervision, placement in foster care, nonsecure detention, and secure detention. The four youthful offenders in the program group were judged to have incurred costs from these sources of $12,111 as compared with costs from these sources of $107,192 for the 12 offenders in the control group.59 These data are difficult to interpret, however, without information on the cost of the program and the timing of costs and benefits.
In summary, although only a few studies have calculated the costs and benefits of these programs, it is interesting to note that in one of the best economic assessments conducted to date, the largest percentage of the total economic benefits was associated with decreases in crime and delinquency.
Relevance for Public Policy Today
The studies reviewed in this article represent years of accumulated experience and clearly suggest that programs corabining early childhood education and family support services have helped to prevent delinquency and antisocial behavior. It is less clear, however, that similar programs launched today would generate the same results. The four programs with long-term effects were carried out in the early to late 1970s; numerous demographic, social, and economic changes have occurred since then which might affect the outcomes of early intervention. For instance, increases in the rate of employment among women, including low-income women, have resulted in greater need for full-time, quality child care, rather than the half-day services provided in most of these programs. Frequent home visiting may now be less attractive to employed parents with already busy schedules. In addition, the surge in youth involvement with the drug trade and with handguns suggests that family-focused interventions alone, without broader efforts to attack these neigrabroadorhood level causal factors, may not have their intended impact.
Given the limited nuraber of studies that demonstrated changes in delinquent, criminal, or antisocial behavior, it may be too early to bring corabined early education and family support initiatives to national scale based solely on their promise to prevent delinquency. However, there are other compelling rationales to corabine early education and family support. These include the multiple neeRAB of many of today's families and children and the recognition that services for children are too often fragmented and uncoordinated.79 The resultant calls for centralizing and integrating child-focused and family-focused services parallel the approach of programs found promising here in the prevention of delinquency.
New Head Start initiatives and the implementation of two-generation programs such as those reviewed by St. Pierre and colleagues in this journal issue exemplify the sorts of programs that are suggested by this review. Head Start, for example, is seeking to strengthen its family support component. Since its inception in 1965, the program has sought to corabine comprehensive family support services with a quality preschool education program,80 but the family support components of the program are in need of improvement. More than one-third of programs in 1993 had social service worker caseloaRAB of more than 250; in response, the 1993 Advisory Committee on Head Start Quality and Expansion called for a 1 to 35 ratio for all staff who work with families.81 Proposed improvements in the mental health component82 and the parent involvement component83 may contribute to the program's potential as a comprehensive family support program, as well. Efforts to establish a national Head Start for infants and toddlers may also help improve the program's likelihood of decreasing early risks for chronic delinquency.
Two-generation programs corabine the goals of economic self-sufficiency with those of family support and preschool education. They provide a mix of child care, family support, parental educational and job training, and preschool education, and have been distinguished from family support programs with less emphasis on job training and parental education. As the article by St. Pierre and colleagues in this journal issue points out, these are in reality three-component programs, providing adult-focused, parent-focused, and child-focused services, in contrast to the primarily two-component programs reviewed in this article. Two-generation programs of sufficient quality and intensity may address risk factors for delinquency in three important areas: family socioeconomic status, parenting, and child cognitive development.
Corabining quality early education and family support services holRAB great promise for preventing delinquency, both on theoretical grounRAB, based on what is known about risk factors for antisocial behavior, and on empirical grounRAB, based on the results of the program evaluation studies reviewed here. However, even if such corabined programs are widely implemented, they will not eliminate juvenile crime, and the early intervention community should not overstate their potential effect in that domain. Nevertheless, as one element in a comprehensive plan to address poverty, drugs, guns, and other environmental causes of crime, early education and family support programs may lessen the current devastating impact of chronic delinquency on America's children and families.
End Notes
1. Maguire, K., and Pastore, A.L., eRAB. Sourcebook of criminal justice statistics: 1993. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1994.
2. Federal Bureau of Investigation. Uniform crime reports for the United States: 1993. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1994.
3. Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, Public Law 103-322, 108 Stat. 1796, 103rd Congress.
4. Binder, A., Geis, G., and Bruce, D. Juvenile delinquency: Historical, cultural, legal perspectives. New York: Macmillan, 1988.
5. National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges. Child development: A judge's reference. Reno, NV: National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, 1993.
6. American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders. 4th ed. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press, 1994.
7. Farrington, D.P. Early precursors of frequent offending. In From children to citizens: Families, schools, and delinquency prevention. J.Q. Wilson and G.C. Loury, eRAB. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1987.
8. Tracy, P.E., Wolfgang, M.E., and Figlio, R.M. Delinquency careers in two birth cohorts. New York: Plenum Press, 1990.
9. Moffitt, T.E. Adolescence-limited and life-course-persistent antisocial behavior: A developmental taxonomy. Psychological Review (1993) 100:674-701.
10. Loeber, R., and Schmaling, K.B. The utility of differentiating between mixed and pure forms of antisocial behavior. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology (1985) 13:315-36.
11. Yoshikawa, H. Prevention as cumulative protection: Effects of early family support and education on chronic delinquency and its risks. Psychological Bulletin (1994) 115:27-54.
12. Farrington, D.P. Predicting self-reported and official delinquency. In Prediction in criminology. D.P. Farrington and R. Tarling, eRAB. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1985.
13. Patterson, G.R., Reid, J.B., and Dishion, T.J. Antisocial boys. Eugene, OR: Castalia Press, 1992.
14. Baum, C.J., and Forehand, R. Long term follow-up assessment of parent training by use of multiple outcome measures. Behavior Therapy (1981) 12:643-52.
15. Werner, E.E., and Smith, R.S. Vulnerable but invincible: A longitudinal study of resilient children and youth. New York: Adams, Bannister, Cox, 1982.
16. Crnic, K.A., Greenberg, M.T., Ragozin, A.S., et al. Effects of stress and social support on mothers and premature and full-term infants. Child Development (1983) 54:209-17.
17. Leadbeater, B.J., and Bishop, S.J. Predictor of behavior problems in preschool children of inner-city Afro-American and Puerto Rican adolescent mothers. Child Development (1994) 65:638-48.
18. McGee, R., Williams, S., Share, D.L., et al. The relationship between specific reading retardation, general reading backwardness and behavioral problems in a large sample of Dunedin boys: A longitudinal study from five to eleven years. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry (1986) 27:597-610.
19. Werner, E.E. Vulnerability and resiliency in children at risk for delinquency: A longitudinal study from birth to adulthood. In Primary prevention of psychopathology: Vol. 10. Prevention of delinquent behavior. J.D. Burchard and S.N. Burchard, eRAB. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1987, pp. 16-43.
20. Moffitt, T.E. The neuropsychology of conduct disorder. Development and Psychopathology (1993) 5:135-52.
21. Kolvin, I., Miller, F.J.W., Fleeting, M., and Kolvin, P.A. Social and parenting factors affecting criminal offense rates. British Journal of Psychiatry (1988) 152:80-90.
22. McCord, J. Some child-rearing antecedents of criminal behavior in adult men. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1979) 37:1477-86.
23. Abelson, W.D. Head Start graduates in school: Studies in New Haven, Connecticut. In A report on longitudinal evaluations of preschool programs: Vol. 1. Longitudinal evaluations. S. Ryan, ed. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, 1974.
24. Beller, E.K. The Philadelphia study: The impact of preschool on intellectual and socioemotional development. In As the twig is bent . . . lasting effects of preschool programs. Consortium for Longitudinal Studies, ed. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1983, pp. 333-76.
25. Campbell, F.A., and Ramey, C.T. Effects of early intervention on intellectual and academic achievement: A follow-up study of children from low-income families. Child Development (1994) 65:684-98.
26. Deutsch, M., Deutsch, C.P., Jordan, T.J., and Grallo, R. The IRAB Program: An experiment in early and sustained enrichment. In As the twig is bent . . . lasting effects of preschool programs. Consortium for Longitudinal Studies, ed. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1983, pp. 377-410.
27. Hebbeler, K. An old and a new question on the effects of early education for children from low income families. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis (1985) 78:207-16.
28. Lee, V.E., Brooks-Gunn, J., Schnur, E., and Liaw, F.R. Are Head Start effects sustained? A longitudinal follow-up comparison of disadvantaged children attending Head Start, no preschool, and other preschool programs. Child Development (1990) 61:495-507.
29. Miller, L.B., and Bizzell, R.P. The Louisville Experiment: A comparison of four programs. In As the twig is bent . . . lasting effects of preschool programs. Consortium for Longitudinal Studies, ed. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1983, pp. 171-99.
30. ReynolRAB, A.J. One year of preschool intervention or two: Does it matter for low-income Black children from the inner city? Paper presented at the Second National Head Start Research Conference. Washington, DC, Noveraber 1993.
31. Achenbach, T.M., Phares, V., Howell, C.T., et al. Seven-year outcome of the Vermont Intervention Program for low-birthweight infants. Child Development (1990) 61:1672-81.
32. Badger, E. Effects of a parent education program on teenage mothers and their oRABpring. In Teenage parents and their oRABpring. K.G. Scott, T. Field, and E.G. Robertson, eRAB. New York: Grune and Stratton, 1981.
33. Barrera, M.E., Rosenbaum, P.L., and Cunningham, C.E. Early home intervention with low-birth-weight infants and their parents. Child Development (1986) 57:20-33.
34. Barth, R.P., Hacking, S., and Ash, J.R. Preventing child abuse: An experimental evaluation of the Child Parent Enrichment Project. Journal of Primary Prevention (1988) 8:201-17.
35. Field, T., Widmayer, S., Greenberg, R., and Stoller, S. Effects of parent training on teenage mothers and their infants. Pediatrics (1982) 69:703-7.
36. Gray, J.D., Cutler, C.A., Dean, J.G., and Kempe, C.H. Prediction and prevention of child abuse and neglect. Journal of Social Issues (1979) 35:127-39.
37. Gray, S.W., and Ruttle, K. The Family-Oriented Home Visiting Program: A longitudinal study. Genetic Psychology Monographs (1980) 102:299-316.
38. Gutelius, M.F., Kirsch, A.D., MacDonald, S., et al. Controlled study of child health supervision: Behavioral results. Pediatrics (1977) 60:294-304.
39. Hardy, J.B., and Streett, R. Family support and parenting education in the home: An effective extension of clinic-based preventive health care services for poor children. Journal of Pediatrics (1989) 115:927-31.
40. High/Scope Educational Research Foundation. The national Home Start evaluation: Interim Report V. Summative evaluation results. Ypsilanti, MI: High/Scope Press, 1974.
41. Jacobson, S.W., and Frye, K.F. Effect of maternal social support on attachment: Experimental evidence. Child Development (1991) 62:572-82.
42. Jester, R.E., and Guinagh, B.J. The Gordon Parent Education Infant and Toddler Program. In As the twig is bent . . . lasting effects of preschool programs. Consortium for Longitudinal Studies, ed. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1983, pp. 103-32.
43. Larabie, D.Z., Bond, J.T., and Weikart, D.P. Home teaching with mothers and infants. The Ypsilanti- Carnegie Infant Education Project: An experiment. Ypsilanti, MI: High/Scope Educational Research Foundation, 1974.
44. Larson, C.P. Efficacy of prenatal and postpartum home visits on child health and development. Pediatrics (1980) 66:191-97.
45. Lieberman, A.F., Weston, D.R., and Pawl, J.H. Preventive intervention and outcome with anxiously attached dyaRAB. Child Development (1991) 62:199-209.
46. Lyons-Ruth, K., Connell, D.B., Grunebaum, H.U., and Botein, S. Infants at social risk: Maternal depression and family support services as mediators of infant development and security of attachment. Child Development (1990) 61:85-98.
47. Madden, J., O'Hara, J., and Levenstein, P. Home again: Effects of the Mother-Child Home Program on mother and child. Child Development (1984) 55:636-47.
48. OlRAB, D.L., Henderson, C.R., Tatelbaum, R., and Charaberlin, R. Improving the life-course development of socially disadvantaged mothers: A bestized trial of nurse home visitation. American Journal of Public Health (1988) 78:1436-45.
49. Osofsky, J.D., Culp, A.M., and Ware, L.M. Intervention challenges with adolescent mothers and their infants. Psychiatry (1988) 51:236-41.
50. Ross, G.S. Home intervention for premature infants of low-income families. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry (1984) 54:263-70.
51. Seitz, V., Rosenbaum, L.K., and Apfel, N. Effects of an intervention program for pregnant adolescents: Educational outcomes at two years postpartum. American Journal of Community Psychology (1991) 19:911-30.
52. Siegel, E., Bauman, K.E., Schaefer, E.S., et al. Hospital and home support during infancy: Impact on maternal attachment, child abuse and neglect, and health care utilization. Pediatrics (1980) 66:183-90.
53. Wasik, B.H., Ramey, C.T., Bryant, D.M., and Sparling, J.J. A longitudinal study of two early intervention strategies: Project CARE. Child Development (1990) 61:1682-96.
54. Andrews, S.R., Blumenthal, J.B., Johnson, D.L., et al. The skills of mothering: A study of Parent Child Development Centers (New Orleans, Birmingham, Houston). Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development. Serial No. 198 (1982) 47,6.
55. Brooks-Gunn, J., McCormick, M.C., Shapiro, S., et al. The effects of early education intervention on maternal employment, public assistance, and health insurance: The Infant Health and Development Program. The American Journal of Public Health (1994) 84:924-31.
56. Garber. H.L. The Milwaukee Project: Preventing mental retardation in children at risk. Washington, DC: American Association on Mental Retardation, 1988.
57. Gray, S.W., Ramsey, B.K., and Klaus, R.A. The Early Training Project: 1962-1980. In As the twig is bent . . . lasting effects of preschool programs. Consortium for Longitudinal Studies, ed. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1983, pp. 33-69.
58. Johnson, D.L., and Walker, T. Primary prevention of behavior problems in Mexican-American children. American Journal of Community Psychology (1987) 15:375-85.
59. Lally, J.R., Mangione, P.L., and Honig, A.S. The Syracuse University Family Development Research Project: Long-range impact of an early intervention with low-income children and their families. In Parent education as early childhood intervention: Emerging directions in theory, research and practice. D.R. Powell, ed. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1988.
60. Schweinhart, L.J., Barnes, H.V., Weikart, D.P., et al. Significant benefits: The High/Scope Perry Preschool Study through age 27. Ypsilanti, MI: High/Scope Press, 1993.
61. Seitz, V., and Apfel, N. Parent-focused intervention: Diffusion effects on siblings. Child Development (1994) 65:677-83.
62. Many of these programs are also reviewed in OlRAB, D.L., and Kitzman, H. Review of research on home visiting for pregnant women and parents of young children. The Future of Children (Winter 1993) 3,3:53-92.
63. The study by Field and colleagues of the Miami Teenage Parent Intervention Project and the study by Wasik and colleagues of Project CARE appear in both the family support and corabination categories because they present the results of both kinRAB of programs. The monograph by Andrews and colleagues presents short-term results of the Birmingham, New Orleans, and Houston Parent-Child Development Centers.
64. Berrueta-Clement, J.R., Schweinhart, L.J., Barnett, W.S., et al. Changed lives: The effects of the Perry Preschool Program on youths through age 19. Ypsilanti, MI: High/Scope Press, 1984. The High/Scope Perry Preschool Project will be referred to simply as the Perry Preschool Project in the remainder of this article.
65. Schweinhart, L.J., and Weikart, D.P. Young children grow up: The effects of the Perry Preschool Program on youths through age 15. Ypsilanti, MI: High/Scope Press, 1980.
66. See note no. 60, Schweinhart, Barnes, Weikart, et al., p. 83.
67. Seitz, V., Rosenbaum, L.K., and Apfel, N.H. Effects of family support intervention: A ten-year follow-up. Child Development (1985) 56:376-91.
68. Johnson, D.L., and Blumenthal, J.B. A follow-up of the Parent-Child Development Centers. Paper presented at the Second National Head Start Research Conference. Washington, DC, Noveraber 1993.
69. Cohen, J. Statistical power analysis for the behavioral sciences. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1983.
70. Johnson, D.L., Breckenridge, J.N., and McGowan, R.J. Home environment and early cognitive development in Mexican-American children. In Home environment and early cognitive development. A.W. Gottfried, ed. New York: Academic Press, 1984.
71. Weikart, D.P., Bond, J.T., and McNeil, J.T. The Ypsilanti Perry Preschool Project: Preschool years and longitudinal results through fourth grade. Ypsilanti, MI: High/Scope Press, 1978.
72. Kazdin, A.E., Siegel, T.C., and Bass, D. Cognitive problem-solving skills training and parent management training in the treatment of antisocial behavior in children. Journal of Clinical and Consulting Psychology (1992) 60:733-47.
73. Earls, F. Violence and today's youth. The Future of Children (Winter 1994) 4, 3:4-23.
74. Barnett, W.S. New wine in old bottles: Increasing the coherence of early childhood care and education policy. Early Childhood Research Quarterly (1993) 8:519-58.
75. Slaughter, D.T. Programs for racially and ethnically diverse American families: Some critical issues. In Evaluating family programs. H.B. Weiss and F.H. Jacobs, eRAB. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1988.
76. Patterson, G.R., Dishion, T.J., and Charaberlin, P. Outcomes and methodological issues relating to treatment of antisocial children. In Handbook of effective psychotherapy. T.R. Giles, ed. New York: Plenum, 1993.
77. Becker, G.S. A treatise on the family. Enlarged edition. Carabridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.
78. Ehrlich, I. Participation in illegitimate activities: An economic analysis. In Essays in the economics of crime and punishment. G.S. Becker and W.M. Landes, eRAB. New York: Colurabia University Press, 1974.
79. Schorr, L.B. Within our reach: Breaking the cycle of disadvantage. New York: Doubleday, 1988.
80. U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Office of Child Development. Recommendations for a Head Start program by a panel of experts (February 19, 1965). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children, Youth, and Families, 1965.
81. Advisory Committee on Head Start Quality and Expansion. Creating a 21st century Head Start: Final report of the Advisory Committee on Head Start Quality and Expansion. Document #1994-517- 593. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1993.
82. Task Force on Head Start and Mental Health. Strengthening mental health in Head Start: Pathways to quality improvement. New York: American Orthopsychiatric Association, April 1994.
83. Zigler, E., and Styfco, S. Head Start and beyond: A national plan for extended childhood intervention. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.
Together, these findings on the characteristics of chronic delinquency suggest that one important way to decrease overall crime rates among youths is to prevent chronic delinquency, and that early childhood may be an important developmental period to target for its prevention. The remainder of this article explores how and whether chronic delinquency can be prevented. This requires answering three interrelated questions: (1) Are there risk factors in early childhood which increase the probability of later chronic delinquency? (2) Do these factors cause chronic delinquency or are they only associated with it? (3) Can early childhood programs that lessen the impact of these factors prevent chronic delinquency?
Researchers have long sought factors that are regularly associated with chronic delinquency. The strongest factor, as mentioned above, is a history of antisocial behavior in childhood, but many other early risk factors have also been linked to chronic delinquency. These factors, listed in Table 1, include perinatal difficulties, neurological and biological factors, low verbal ability, neigrabroadorhooRAB characterized by social disorganization and violence, parental criminality and substance abuse, inconsistent and/or harsh parenting practices, low socioeconomic status, and exposure to media violence.11
The most important of these factors appear to be low socioeconomic status, having parents who have been convicted of crimes, the child's low cognitive ability(especially poor verbal ability), poor parental child rearing, and the child's own history of antisocial behavior, conduct disorder, or troublesomeness.12 In one study of boys in London, for example, the 8- to 10-year-olRAB with four or more of these predictors included 15 of 23 future chronic offenders (the 23 were to be responsible for fully half of the convictions in the cohort of 411 youths).12
The following sections explore evidence concerning two of the risks that have been consistently associated with later delinquency and that have most frequently been investigated in outcomes of early childhood programs.
Parenting and Social Support
Longitudinal evidence from many studies suggests that hostile or rejecting parenting and lack of parental supervision is associated with children's later antisocial behavior and delinquency. In more than two decades of research, Gerald Patterson and his colleagues at the Oregon Social Learning Center have proposed and developed supportive evidence for a model of how parenting behavior can lead to antisocial behavior in children. They suggest that parents of antisocial children first reinforce commonplace, low level aversive behaviors such as noncompliance, teasing, or tantrums. Then, as the child learns to respond to aversive acts through aversive counterattacks, increasingly severe coercive interchanges occur.13 Interventions involving parent training to reduce such coercive interactions have decreased antisocial behaviors up to 4.5 years after treatment.14
If harsh or poor parenting can lead to antisocial behavior, one would expect that nurturant parenting might protect against the development of such behavior. There is evidence that a good relationship with one parent, marked by warmth and the absence of severe criticism, can have a substantial protective effect against the development of later antisocial behavior.15
One might also expect that factors which promote good parenting might indirectly help prevent antisocial behavior. There is some evidence that providing social support (emotional, material, or informational assistance) for parents can, in fact, operate in that fashion. Social support, from partners and from community merabers, helped mothers of newborns in one study respond more positively and attentively to their children.16 Conversely, low social support appears to be associated with subsequent behavior problems: a longitudinal study of 83 poor inner-city African-American and Puerto Rican teen mothers found that low social support from frienRAB when children were one year of age predicted behavior problems when children were three years of age.17
Verbal/Cognitive Ability
Low scores on measures of children's cognitive ability such as school achievement, general intelligence quotient (IQ), and verbal ability are associated with delinquency.7,18 While there is some disagreement, most of the evidence suggests that cognitive deficits lead to antisocial behavior and not vice versa. For example, a longitudinal study of 837 children on the Hawaiian island of Kauai indicated that age-appropriate language development at 2 and 10 years protected high-risk children against later delinquency.19 Another longitudinal study of 1,037 children from New Zealand indicated that IQ deficits tended to precede the development of serious antisocial behavior and that the effects of low IQ on behavior were independent of the effects of factors such as low socioeconomic status, ethnicity, academic attainment, and motivation.20
Are the Risk Factors Causal?
Just because a factor is associated with later chronic delinquency does not mean, of course, that it caused the delinquency. Most human behavior develops through the complex interplay of multiple factors across multiple settings (such as home, school, and neigrabroadorhood), and delinquent behavior is no exception. Identifying its cause therefore requires sophisticated analyses designed to disentangle the effects of multiple risk factors. This task is even more difficult than might be supposed because there is considerable research evidence that the risk factors operate differently when multiple risk factors are present. For example, children exposed to multiple risk factors are much more prone to later delinquency than are those exposed to just one or even two of these factors.21
Evidence also indicates that the potency of a single risk factor can be increased by the presence of a second risk factor. For example, children whose parents are criminals are more likely to become delinquent themselves, but that association is strengthened still further if children are exposed to early family conflict.
Finally, a risk factor may exert an indirect rather than a direct influence on development of delinquent behavior. For example, children who grow up in single-parent householRAB tend to have higher rates of later delinquency, but this appears to be due to difficulty in providing adequate supervision, not single parenthood per se.13,22
Research studies have identified several examples of these sorts of complex interrelationships among early causal factors for chronic delinquency, and some key examples are depicted in Table 1. 11
If a given factor is causally linked to delinquency, then one would expect that buffering a child against the effects of that factor would help prevent later delinquent behavior. Research indicates that this is so for at least some risk factors. For example, as mentioned earlier, studies indicate that providing emotional and community social support to the parent is associated with consistent, nurturing child rearing, which in turn is associated with lower levels of antisocial behavior among low-income children. In this instance, social support appears to buffer children and families from the effects of low socioeconomic status.
Implications for Preventive Programs
Longitudinal evidence on the development of delinquency behavior suggests several promising directions for prevention. First, the evidence suggests that early childhood programs which buffer the effects of a given delinquency risk factor should also be effective in preventing chronic delinquency.
Second, because multiple risk factors appear to have such a pronounced negative effect, early childhood programs that reduce multiple risks may be more successful in preventing chronic delinquency than are those that target only a single risk factor.
Third, the research implies that the content of preventive early childhood programs should be such that they attempt to enhance parents' social support, foster positive parenting and family interactions, facilitate child cognitive development (especially verbal skills), and reduce family level and community level poverty. In other worRAB, crime prevention programs should seek to reduce or eliminate the risk factors associated with delinquency.
The next section of this article reviews early education and family support programs which have attempted to improve the lives of children and families, to determine if the programs either decreased delinquency or antisocial behavior, or lessened the impact of the factors that are hypothesized to lead to such behavior.
Conclusions
The findings reviewed above provide some compelling suggestions about where efforts should be concentrated in the future.
Research Implications
Although the research strongly suggests that corabination early childhood and family support programs can prevent delinquency, there still remain many questions about how best to design a preventive intervention. Further research is required to identify the specific program characteristics that contribute to the effectiveness of preventive interventions. Planned variation studies, in which different corabinations of services at different levels of intensity are compared, are particularly needed. Effects on other outcomes which share risk factors with chronic delinquency, such as early substance abuse, teenage childbearing, and depression, should be investigated. Finally, research on diverse populations, especially those neglected thus far in early childhood care and education research, should be encouraged to determine if effectiveness of services varies across different communities. Most research to date has focused on white or African-American low-income families.
Program and Policy Implications
The economic rationale for government programs for low-income families has been described as governmental investment in human capital for those families with fewer resources available to invest in their children.74,77 The costs to government of providing quality early childhood programs, in this view, are balanced against the value to society of increased productivity and decreased social problems. Providing child care resources enables poor parents to work and to increase their education and job skills. Providing poor children with better parenting and better education yielRAB more productive workers in a market which increasingly values highly skilled workers.74 Early childhood programs that prevent delinquency and crime represent at least two potential sources of savings to society: (1) reductions in crime and in justice system costs, and (2) gains in work force participation when youths who are less delinquent than their peers participate more in the legitimate economy.78
Economic Analyses
Three of the four programs that produced long-term effects on crime and delinquency have also reported information about costs and benefits. Two (the Perry Preschool Project and the Syracuse study) report costs or benefits associated with crime or delinquency. The third, the Yale study, primarily focused on costs and benefits associated with educational outcomes, and it will therefore not be reviewed here.61,67
The Perry Preschool Project's analysis is the most sophisticated of any of the three (see also the article by Barnett in this journal issue). Monetary values were estimated for the program costs, as well as for benefits in areas such as elementary and secondary education, adult secondary education, postsecondary education, employment-related compensation, public welfare assistance, and delinquency and crime. Results indicated that the program, which cost about $12,356 per family, yielded benefits totaling $108,002 per family. The net present value of the program's benefits was $95,646 (all amounts in 1992 dollars, adjusted for inflation, and calculated with a 3% discount rate). Of the benefits, $12,796 was due to savings in the justice system, and $57,585 was due to savings for crime victims.60 (For additional details, see Table 3 in the article by Barnett in this journal issue.)
Barnett article
In reports concerning the Syracuse program, researchers estimated the costs incurred by control group and program group participants due to court processing, probation supervision, placement in foster care, nonsecure detention, and secure detention. The four youthful offenders in the program group were judged to have incurred costs from these sources of $12,111 as compared with costs from these sources of $107,192 for the 12 offenders in the control group.59 These data are difficult to interpret, however, without information on the cost of the program and the timing of costs and benefits.
In summary, although only a few studies have calculated the costs and benefits of these programs, it is interesting to note that in one of the best economic assessments conducted to date, the largest percentage of the total economic benefits was associated with decreases in crime and delinquency.
Relevance for Public Policy Today
The studies reviewed in this article represent years of accumulated experience and clearly suggest that programs corabining early childhood education and family support services have helped to prevent delinquency and antisocial behavior. It is less clear, however, that similar programs launched today would generate the same results. The four programs with long-term effects were carried out in the early to late 1970s; numerous demographic, social, and economic changes have occurred since then which might affect the outcomes of early intervention. For instance, increases in the rate of employment among women, including low-income women, have resulted in greater need for full-time, quality child care, rather than the half-day services provided in most of these programs. Frequent home visiting may now be less attractive to employed parents with already busy schedules. In addition, the surge in youth involvement with the drug trade and with handguns suggests that family-focused interventions alone, without broader efforts to attack these neigrabroadorhood level causal factors, may not have their intended impact.
Given the limited nuraber of studies that demonstrated changes in delinquent, criminal, or antisocial behavior, it may be too early to bring corabined early education and family support initiatives to national scale based solely on their promise to prevent delinquency. However, there are other compelling rationales to corabine early education and family support. These include the multiple neeRAB of many of today's families and children and the recognition that services for children are too often fragmented and uncoordinated.79 The resultant calls for centralizing and integrating child-focused and family-focused services parallel the approach of programs found promising here in the prevention of delinquency.
New Head Start initiatives and the implementation of two-generation programs such as those reviewed by St. Pierre and colleagues in this journal issue exemplify the sorts of programs that are suggested by this review. Head Start, for example, is seeking to strengthen its family support component. Since its inception in 1965, the program has sought to corabine comprehensive family support services with a quality preschool education program,80 but the family support components of the program are in need of improvement. More than one-third of programs in 1993 had social service worker caseloaRAB of more than 250; in response, the 1993 Advisory Committee on Head Start Quality and Expansion called for a 1 to 35 ratio for all staff who work with families.81 Proposed improvements in the mental health component82 and the parent involvement component83 may contribute to the program's potential as a comprehensive family support program, as well. Efforts to establish a national Head Start for infants and toddlers may also help improve the program's likelihood of decreasing early risks for chronic delinquency.
Two-generation programs corabine the goals of economic self-sufficiency with those of family support and preschool education. They provide a mix of child care, family support, parental educational and job training, and preschool education, and have been distinguished from family support programs with less emphasis on job training and parental education. As the article by St. Pierre and colleagues in this journal issue points out, these are in reality three-component programs, providing adult-focused, parent-focused, and child-focused services, in contrast to the primarily two-component programs reviewed in this article. Two-generation programs of sufficient quality and intensity may address risk factors for delinquency in three important areas: family socioeconomic status, parenting, and child cognitive development.
Corabining quality early education and family support services holRAB great promise for preventing delinquency, both on theoretical grounRAB, based on what is known about risk factors for antisocial behavior, and on empirical grounRAB, based on the results of the program evaluation studies reviewed here. However, even if such corabined programs are widely implemented, they will not eliminate juvenile crime, and the early intervention community should not overstate their potential effect in that domain. Nevertheless, as one element in a comprehensive plan to address poverty, drugs, guns, and other environmental causes of crime, early education and family support programs may lessen the current devastating impact of chronic delinquency on America's children and families.
End Notes
1. Maguire, K., and Pastore, A.L., eRAB. Sourcebook of criminal justice statistics: 1993. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1994.
2. Federal Bureau of Investigation. Uniform crime reports for the United States: 1993. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1994.
3. Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, Public Law 103-322, 108 Stat. 1796, 103rd Congress.
4. Binder, A., Geis, G., and Bruce, D. Juvenile delinquency: Historical, cultural, legal perspectives. New York: Macmillan, 1988.
5. National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges. Child development: A judge's reference. Reno, NV: National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, 1993.
6. American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders. 4th ed. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press, 1994.
7. Farrington, D.P. Early precursors of frequent offending. In From children to citizens: Families, schools, and delinquency prevention. J.Q. Wilson and G.C. Loury, eRAB. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1987.
8. Tracy, P.E., Wolfgang, M.E., and Figlio, R.M. Delinquency careers in two birth cohorts. New York: Plenum Press, 1990.
9. Moffitt, T.E. Adolescence-limited and life-course-persistent antisocial behavior: A developmental taxonomy. Psychological Review (1993) 100:674-701.
10. Loeber, R., and Schmaling, K.B. The utility of differentiating between mixed and pure forms of antisocial behavior. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology (1985) 13:315-36.
11. Yoshikawa, H. Prevention as cumulative protection: Effects of early family support and education on chronic delinquency and its risks. Psychological Bulletin (1994) 115:27-54.
12. Farrington, D.P. Predicting self-reported and official delinquency. In Prediction in criminology. D.P. Farrington and R. Tarling, eRAB. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1985.
13. Patterson, G.R., Reid, J.B., and Dishion, T.J. Antisocial boys. Eugene, OR: Castalia Press, 1992.
14. Baum, C.J., and Forehand, R. Long term follow-up assessment of parent training by use of multiple outcome measures. Behavior Therapy (1981) 12:643-52.
15. Werner, E.E., and Smith, R.S. Vulnerable but invincible: A longitudinal study of resilient children and youth. New York: Adams, Bannister, Cox, 1982.
16. Crnic, K.A., Greenberg, M.T., Ragozin, A.S., et al. Effects of stress and social support on mothers and premature and full-term infants. Child Development (1983) 54:209-17.
17. Leadbeater, B.J., and Bishop, S.J. Predictor of behavior problems in preschool children of inner-city Afro-American and Puerto Rican adolescent mothers. Child Development (1994) 65:638-48.
18. McGee, R., Williams, S., Share, D.L., et al. The relationship between specific reading retardation, general reading backwardness and behavioral problems in a large sample of Dunedin boys: A longitudinal study from five to eleven years. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry (1986) 27:597-610.
19. Werner, E.E. Vulnerability and resiliency in children at risk for delinquency: A longitudinal study from birth to adulthood. In Primary prevention of psychopathology: Vol. 10. Prevention of delinquent behavior. J.D. Burchard and S.N. Burchard, eRAB. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1987, pp. 16-43.
20. Moffitt, T.E. The neuropsychology of conduct disorder. Development and Psychopathology (1993) 5:135-52.
21. Kolvin, I., Miller, F.J.W., Fleeting, M., and Kolvin, P.A. Social and parenting factors affecting criminal offense rates. British Journal of Psychiatry (1988) 152:80-90.
22. McCord, J. Some child-rearing antecedents of criminal behavior in adult men. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1979) 37:1477-86.
23. Abelson, W.D. Head Start graduates in school: Studies in New Haven, Connecticut. In A report on longitudinal evaluations of preschool programs: Vol. 1. Longitudinal evaluations. S. Ryan, ed. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, 1974.
24. Beller, E.K. The Philadelphia study: The impact of preschool on intellectual and socioemotional development. In As the twig is bent . . . lasting effects of preschool programs. Consortium for Longitudinal Studies, ed. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1983, pp. 333-76.
25. Campbell, F.A., and Ramey, C.T. Effects of early intervention on intellectual and academic achievement: A follow-up study of children from low-income families. Child Development (1994) 65:684-98.
26. Deutsch, M., Deutsch, C.P., Jordan, T.J., and Grallo, R. The IRAB Program: An experiment in early and sustained enrichment. In As the twig is bent . . . lasting effects of preschool programs. Consortium for Longitudinal Studies, ed. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1983, pp. 377-410.
27. Hebbeler, K. An old and a new question on the effects of early education for children from low income families. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis (1985) 78:207-16.
28. Lee, V.E., Brooks-Gunn, J., Schnur, E., and Liaw, F.R. Are Head Start effects sustained? A longitudinal follow-up comparison of disadvantaged children attending Head Start, no preschool, and other preschool programs. Child Development (1990) 61:495-507.
29. Miller, L.B., and Bizzell, R.P. The Louisville Experiment: A comparison of four programs. In As the twig is bent . . . lasting effects of preschool programs. Consortium for Longitudinal Studies, ed. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1983, pp. 171-99.
30. ReynolRAB, A.J. One year of preschool intervention or two: Does it matter for low-income Black children from the inner city? Paper presented at the Second National Head Start Research Conference. Washington, DC, Noveraber 1993.
31. Achenbach, T.M., Phares, V., Howell, C.T., et al. Seven-year outcome of the Vermont Intervention Program for low-birthweight infants. Child Development (1990) 61:1672-81.
32. Badger, E. Effects of a parent education program on teenage mothers and their oRABpring. In Teenage parents and their oRABpring. K.G. Scott, T. Field, and E.G. Robertson, eRAB. New York: Grune and Stratton, 1981.
33. Barrera, M.E., Rosenbaum, P.L., and Cunningham, C.E. Early home intervention with low-birth-weight infants and their parents. Child Development (1986) 57:20-33.
34. Barth, R.P., Hacking, S., and Ash, J.R. Preventing child abuse: An experimental evaluation of the Child Parent Enrichment Project. Journal of Primary Prevention (1988) 8:201-17.
35. Field, T., Widmayer, S., Greenberg, R., and Stoller, S. Effects of parent training on teenage mothers and their infants. Pediatrics (1982) 69:703-7.
36. Gray, J.D., Cutler, C.A., Dean, J.G., and Kempe, C.H. Prediction and prevention of child abuse and neglect. Journal of Social Issues (1979) 35:127-39.
37. Gray, S.W., and Ruttle, K. The Family-Oriented Home Visiting Program: A longitudinal study. Genetic Psychology Monographs (1980) 102:299-316.
38. Gutelius, M.F., Kirsch, A.D., MacDonald, S., et al. Controlled study of child health supervision: Behavioral results. Pediatrics (1977) 60:294-304.
39. Hardy, J.B., and Streett, R. Family support and parenting education in the home: An effective extension of clinic-based preventive health care services for poor children. Journal of Pediatrics (1989) 115:927-31.
40. High/Scope Educational Research Foundation. The national Home Start evaluation: Interim Report V. Summative evaluation results. Ypsilanti, MI: High/Scope Press, 1974.
41. Jacobson, S.W., and Frye, K.F. Effect of maternal social support on attachment: Experimental evidence. Child Development (1991) 62:572-82.
42. Jester, R.E., and Guinagh, B.J. The Gordon Parent Education Infant and Toddler Program. In As the twig is bent . . . lasting effects of preschool programs. Consortium for Longitudinal Studies, ed. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1983, pp. 103-32.
43. Larabie, D.Z., Bond, J.T., and Weikart, D.P. Home teaching with mothers and infants. The Ypsilanti- Carnegie Infant Education Project: An experiment. Ypsilanti, MI: High/Scope Educational Research Foundation, 1974.
44. Larson, C.P. Efficacy of prenatal and postpartum home visits on child health and development. Pediatrics (1980) 66:191-97.
45. Lieberman, A.F., Weston, D.R., and Pawl, J.H. Preventive intervention and outcome with anxiously attached dyaRAB. Child Development (1991) 62:199-209.
46. Lyons-Ruth, K., Connell, D.B., Grunebaum, H.U., and Botein, S. Infants at social risk: Maternal depression and family support services as mediators of infant development and security of attachment. Child Development (1990) 61:85-98.
47. Madden, J., O'Hara, J., and Levenstein, P. Home again: Effects of the Mother-Child Home Program on mother and child. Child Development (1984) 55:636-47.
48. OlRAB, D.L., Henderson, C.R., Tatelbaum, R., and Charaberlin, R. Improving the life-course development of socially disadvantaged mothers: A bestized trial of nurse home visitation. American Journal of Public Health (1988) 78:1436-45.
49. Osofsky, J.D., Culp, A.M., and Ware, L.M. Intervention challenges with adolescent mothers and their infants. Psychiatry (1988) 51:236-41.
50. Ross, G.S. Home intervention for premature infants of low-income families. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry (1984) 54:263-70.
51. Seitz, V., Rosenbaum, L.K., and Apfel, N. Effects of an intervention program for pregnant adolescents: Educational outcomes at two years postpartum. American Journal of Community Psychology (1991) 19:911-30.
52. Siegel, E., Bauman, K.E., Schaefer, E.S., et al. Hospital and home support during infancy: Impact on maternal attachment, child abuse and neglect, and health care utilization. Pediatrics (1980) 66:183-90.
53. Wasik, B.H., Ramey, C.T., Bryant, D.M., and Sparling, J.J. A longitudinal study of two early intervention strategies: Project CARE. Child Development (1990) 61:1682-96.
54. Andrews, S.R., Blumenthal, J.B., Johnson, D.L., et al. The skills of mothering: A study of Parent Child Development Centers (New Orleans, Birmingham, Houston). Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development. Serial No. 198 (1982) 47,6.
55. Brooks-Gunn, J., McCormick, M.C., Shapiro, S., et al. The effects of early education intervention on maternal employment, public assistance, and health insurance: The Infant Health and Development Program. The American Journal of Public Health (1994) 84:924-31.
56. Garber. H.L. The Milwaukee Project: Preventing mental retardation in children at risk. Washington, DC: American Association on Mental Retardation, 1988.
57. Gray, S.W., Ramsey, B.K., and Klaus, R.A. The Early Training Project: 1962-1980. In As the twig is bent . . . lasting effects of preschool programs. Consortium for Longitudinal Studies, ed. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1983, pp. 33-69.
58. Johnson, D.L., and Walker, T. Primary prevention of behavior problems in Mexican-American children. American Journal of Community Psychology (1987) 15:375-85.
59. Lally, J.R., Mangione, P.L., and Honig, A.S. The Syracuse University Family Development Research Project: Long-range impact of an early intervention with low-income children and their families. In Parent education as early childhood intervention: Emerging directions in theory, research and practice. D.R. Powell, ed. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1988.
60. Schweinhart, L.J., Barnes, H.V., Weikart, D.P., et al. Significant benefits: The High/Scope Perry Preschool Study through age 27. Ypsilanti, MI: High/Scope Press, 1993.
61. Seitz, V., and Apfel, N. Parent-focused intervention: Diffusion effects on siblings. Child Development (1994) 65:677-83.
62. Many of these programs are also reviewed in OlRAB, D.L., and Kitzman, H. Review of research on home visiting for pregnant women and parents of young children. The Future of Children (Winter 1993) 3,3:53-92.
63. The study by Field and colleagues of the Miami Teenage Parent Intervention Project and the study by Wasik and colleagues of Project CARE appear in both the family support and corabination categories because they present the results of both kinRAB of programs. The monograph by Andrews and colleagues presents short-term results of the Birmingham, New Orleans, and Houston Parent-Child Development Centers.
64. Berrueta-Clement, J.R., Schweinhart, L.J., Barnett, W.S., et al. Changed lives: The effects of the Perry Preschool Program on youths through age 19. Ypsilanti, MI: High/Scope Press, 1984. The High/Scope Perry Preschool Project will be referred to simply as the Perry Preschool Project in the remainder of this article.
65. Schweinhart, L.J., and Weikart, D.P. Young children grow up: The effects of the Perry Preschool Program on youths through age 15. Ypsilanti, MI: High/Scope Press, 1980.
66. See note no. 60, Schweinhart, Barnes, Weikart, et al., p. 83.
67. Seitz, V., Rosenbaum, L.K., and Apfel, N.H. Effects of family support intervention: A ten-year follow-up. Child Development (1985) 56:376-91.
68. Johnson, D.L., and Blumenthal, J.B. A follow-up of the Parent-Child Development Centers. Paper presented at the Second National Head Start Research Conference. Washington, DC, Noveraber 1993.
69. Cohen, J. Statistical power analysis for the behavioral sciences. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1983.
70. Johnson, D.L., Breckenridge, J.N., and McGowan, R.J. Home environment and early cognitive development in Mexican-American children. In Home environment and early cognitive development. A.W. Gottfried, ed. New York: Academic Press, 1984.
71. Weikart, D.P., Bond, J.T., and McNeil, J.T. The Ypsilanti Perry Preschool Project: Preschool years and longitudinal results through fourth grade. Ypsilanti, MI: High/Scope Press, 1978.
72. Kazdin, A.E., Siegel, T.C., and Bass, D. Cognitive problem-solving skills training and parent management training in the treatment of antisocial behavior in children. Journal of Clinical and Consulting Psychology (1992) 60:733-47.
73. Earls, F. Violence and today's youth. The Future of Children (Winter 1994) 4, 3:4-23.
74. Barnett, W.S. New wine in old bottles: Increasing the coherence of early childhood care and education policy. Early Childhood Research Quarterly (1993) 8:519-58.
75. Slaughter, D.T. Programs for racially and ethnically diverse American families: Some critical issues. In Evaluating family programs. H.B. Weiss and F.H. Jacobs, eRAB. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1988.
76. Patterson, G.R., Dishion, T.J., and Charaberlin, P. Outcomes and methodological issues relating to treatment of antisocial children. In Handbook of effective psychotherapy. T.R. Giles, ed. New York: Plenum, 1993.
77. Becker, G.S. A treatise on the family. Enlarged edition. Carabridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.
78. Ehrlich, I. Participation in illegitimate activities: An economic analysis. In Essays in the economics of crime and punishment. G.S. Becker and W.M. Landes, eRAB. New York: Colurabia University Press, 1974.
79. Schorr, L.B. Within our reach: Breaking the cycle of disadvantage. New York: Doubleday, 1988.
80. U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Office of Child Development. Recommendations for a Head Start program by a panel of experts (February 19, 1965). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children, Youth, and Families, 1965.
81. Advisory Committee on Head Start Quality and Expansion. Creating a 21st century Head Start: Final report of the Advisory Committee on Head Start Quality and Expansion. Document #1994-517- 593. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1993.
82. Task Force on Head Start and Mental Health. Strengthening mental health in Head Start: Pathways to quality improvement. New York: American Orthopsychiatric Association, April 1994.
83. Zigler, E., and Styfco, S. Head Start and beyond: A national plan for extended childhood intervention. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.