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Citation:

Farran, D. (2000). Another decade of intervention for children who are low income or disabled: What do we know now? In J. Shonkoff & S. Meisels (Eds.), Handbook of early childhood intervention (2nd ed., pp. 510-548). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Annotation:
This detailed review of a number of early intervention programs is a follow-up to a similar Òdecade reviewÓ conducted by the author and published in 1990. The review is divided into two distinct sections, one focused on interventions for young children who are disadvantaged by poverty and the other on interventions for children with disabilities. The review of programs for children in poverty first provides updated data and extensive contextual discussion of four major programs that were initiated in the 1960s or 1970s: the Abecedarian project and its offshoot, Project Care; the Parent Child Development Centers; the High/Scope Perry Preschool program; and Head Start. In addition, Farran reviews four programs that were initiated more recently: the Infant Health and Development Program; the Chicago Child Parent Centers; and a pair of two-generation programs, Even Start and Parents as Teachers. Methodological problems and issues as well as findings are described. For the most part, these programs showed only modest positive effects. Farran attempts to explore the reasons for such modest effects, as well as the reasons that, in several cases, early positive effects dissipated within a relatively short period of time. Her primary conclusion addresses the lack of attention to what she assesses as critical family contexts among the intervention programs: ÒThere is a lack of recognition of the intimate relationship between parenting and context; parenting grows out of the contexts in which families are functioning. Change the context and parenting itself will change. None of the programs reviewed here made any difference to the income, housing conditions, or employment of the parents involved, despite the fact that the families were often chosen because they had extremely low incomes. If such issues are not going to be addressed by intervention programs, then the best intervention may be to provide clean, positive, enriched child-care centers with adequate adult-child ratios for the children to attend until school entryÓ (p. 525).