The high societal and personal costs of child maltreatment make identification of effective early prevention programs a high research priority. Early Head Start (EHS), a dual generational program serving low-income families with children prenatally through age three years, is one of the largest federally funded programs for infants and toddlers in the United States. A national randomized trial found EHS to be effective in improving parent and child outcomes, but its effectiveness in reducing child maltreatment was not assessed. The current study used administrative data from state child welfare agencies to examine the impact of EHS on documented abuse and neglect among children from seven of the original seventeen programs in the national EHS randomized controlled trial. Results indicated that children in EHS had significantly fewer child welfare encounters between the ages of five and nine years than did children in the control group, and that EHS slowed the rate of subsequent encounters. Additionally, compared to children in the control group, children in EHS were less likely to have a substantiated report of physical or sexual abuse, but more likely to have a substantiated report of neglect. These findings suggest that EHS may be effective in reducing child maltreatment among low-income children, in particular, physical and sexual abuse.

The Newborn Behavioral Observations (NBO) system is a neurobehavioral observation tool designed to sensitize parents to infants' capacities and individuality and to enhance the parent–infant relationship by strengthening parents' confidence and practical skills in caring for their children. The NBO's focus on relationship building is intended for infant mental health professionals who strive for a relational, family-centered model of care versus a pathology-based model. This study assessed the impact of the NBO on the sensitivity of mother–infant interaction in the first 4 months of life. Primiparous mothers and their full-term infants were randomized into experimental and control groups. The intervention group participated in the NBO in the hospital within 2 days of birth and again at home at 1 month postpartum. At 4 months, dyads (n = 35) were videotaped during semistructured play episodes, which were coded to assess parent–child sensitivity in interactions with one another. Intervention infants were 2.8 times more likely to be classified as “cooperative” (sensitive) than control group infants. Intervention mothers were 2.5 times more likely to be classified as sensitive than control mothers. These findings highlight the potential of the NBO to promote positive maternal–infant relations by influencing newborn behavior and suggest that the NBO is an effective, time-limited intervention for strengthening relationships between parents and infants.

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in using administrative data collected by state child welfare agencies as a source of information for research and evaluation. The challenges of obtaining access to and using these data, however, have not been well documented. This study describes the processes used to access child welfare records in six different states and the approach to combining and using the information gathered to evaluate the impact of the Early Head Start program on children's involvement with the child welfare system from birth through age eleven. We provide “lessons learned” for researchers who are attempting to use this information, including being prepared for long delays in access to information, the need for deep understanding of how child welfare agencies record and code information, and for considerable data management work for translating agency records into analysis-ready datasets. While accessing and using this information is not easy, and the data have a number of limitations, we suggest that the benefits can outweigh the challenges and that these records can be a useful source of information for policy-relevant child welfare research.

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