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The Helping Children Achieve study is a randomised controlled trial designed to test the effectiveness of parenting interventions for children at risk of anti‐social behaviour. The paper aims to examine the challenges in recruitment to the HCA trial.

The study is on‐going and is being conducted at two sites: an inner city London borough and a city in the South West of England. In total, 395 participants consented to participate in the trial; 325 were assessed at baseline and 215 met the criteria and agreed to take part. Recruitment used population screens and referrals.

The screening procedure was more labour intensive but attracted greater numbers, including many parents who might not otherwise have sought help and included many families from disadvantaged backgrounds. The referrals included those with more serious problems and a higher proportion engaged with the service. Recruitment rates were lower in the London site due to ineligibility and greater difficulty in accessing schools. Retention in the two areas was similar.

The study provides data on recruitment challenges and lessons learned that could help formulate future policy regarding service delivery. Also of value is the finding that it is possible to conduct population screens in very deprived, multi‐ethnic areas and to get high rates of return.

Child and family health (CAFH) services in Australia initially provide at least one nurse-home-visit following the birth of a child. Planning and referral then commences for the on-going provision of appropriate services to families. Unfortunately, services in rural and regional communities in Australia can be fragmented and poorly resourced. Little is known about CAFH nurses’ experiences of working with families in these communities. The purpose of this paper is to examine the way CAFH nurses work within a universal health service model that may be compromised by isolation, discontinuity and fragmentation.

Focus groups with 26 CAFH nurses from five rural, two regional and one urban community in New South Wales (NSW), Australia were conducted. A secondary, thematic analysis of the qualitative data were undertaken to reflect on change and continuity in the field of universal CAFH services. Analysis was driven by two key research questions: How do CAFH nurses experience their role in universal home-based CAFH services within rural and regional areas of Australia and, what unique factors are present in rural and regional areas that impact on their CAFH nursing role?

The experience of the CAFH nurses as presented by these data revealed a role that was family centred and concerned for the welfare of the family, yet compromised by the need to meet the disproportionately complex needs of families in the absence of a strong network of services. The opportunity to present the findings provides insight into the way in which families engage with available services in isolated communities. CAFH nurses in the study attempted to maintain service integrity by adapting to the unique context of their work.

It is important to understand the mechanisms through which CAFH nurses operate to work effectively with families referred to their service. This paper describes the way in which CAFH nurses work with families not meeting the threshold for more intensive and targeted home-visiting service delivery in rural and regional communities of NSW, Australia.

The purpose of this paper is to examine Family Development Centre (FDC) staff’s[1] perspectives on their roles and capacity to promote early childhood language learning through good parenting.

This research employed in-depth interviews with 30 FDC coordinators and volunteer staff, supported by limited field observations.

Identifying risk, surveillance of at-risk families, building community solidarity and activities to support parenting and children, emerged as key components of FDC work. Volunteers softened their surveillance role by emphasising their social support function and personal links to local communities. Most activities aimed to strengthen family bonding and relationships, with fewer specifically addressing early childhood language deficits. Volunteers found the latter challenging, and generally sought to work in cooperation with education, public health and child care staff where projects involved language development.

Most volunteers said they lacked the capacities to promote early language development effectively and required additional training in such areas as partnerships and collaboration, family and parenting support, and project management. The authors argue that the importance given to partnerships reflects volunteers’ recognition that they need to draw on outside expertise to address children’s language problems. Given resource constraints, volunteers will remain central to family support work for the immediate future. Even with training lay volunteers will not become language experts, and future policy should centre on building a framework of professional support for the community teams.

This study fills a gap in knowledge about FDC volunteer roles and suggests a need for training that focuses on teamwork rather than specialist language expertise.

This article reflects on the significance of family centres in the UK as a mirror of new possibilities for child welfare in the years following the Children Act 1989. The Act empowered local authorities in England and Wales to provide family centres as part of ‘family support practice’. The article reveals a rich vein of family‐centred, centre‐based activity internationally and shows practice combining intervention from the sophisticated to the very informal. The authors focus on so‐called ‘integrated centres’ as complex systems of care with wide implications for practice and outcome evaluation in an ‘evidence‐based’ context.

Children’s fruit intake is a part of healthy nutrition. Several children’s food products “look like” fruit; hence potentially fruit substitutes. Packaging includes brand names, indicators, and health claims related to fruit. These packaging cues may potentially lead to misperceptions of the products. The purpose of this paper is to examine at-risk parents’ substitutions of children’s fruit-branded products for real fruit. At-risk parents are of particular interest as they are a vulnerable segment when it comes to nutrition.

At-risk families (n=149) completed a survey of their perceptions of children’s nutritional needs, fruit product substitutions, and brand purchase behavior.

At-risk parents report erroneous perceptions of children’s nutritional fruit intake needs. The results suggest that parents believe fruit-branded products are equivalent to real fruit. Parents’ knowledge and beliefs of fruit equivalency impact purchase decisions.

Limitations include potential self-reporting and convenience sampling bias. The study did not attend to the complete product nutritional profile; only on fruit content. Future research should investigate other factors affecting food purchase decisions.

Industry and policy implications include the balance between governmental regulation of food marketing, voluntary corporate responsibility, and the need for education.

This study provides insights into children’s food product packaging on at-risk family perceptions of real fruit substitutes and purchase behaviors. With the market for these products increasing, there is limited research investigating the impact of these products on children’s nutritional intake.

This article analyses UK Early Years policy in terms of service expansion and service transformation since the Labour Government's election in 1997. Childcare is now a matter of public policy, driven largely by concerns about child poverty and inequalities in children's life chances. The evidence is considered, first, on service expansion, increased take‐up and increased employment by parents with young children, and, second, on service transformation and child outcomes: to what extent have changes benefited disadvantaged children, families and neighbourhoods? The Effective Provision of Preschool Education (EPPE) research shows that pre‐school can boost disadvantaged children's intellectual development in particular, and the article concludes that programmes such as Sure Start and Neighbourhood Nurseries have been successfully targeted at the most disadvantaged areas, although better‐off families and neighbourhoods may have benefited even more, and that problems of cost and sustainability remain. It is too early to judge whether better integrated services now being developed will be successful in transforming the lives of the most disadvantaged children.

The aim of this article is to summarise the available evidence from systematic reviews about the effectiveness of interventions to prevent or treat child physical abuse and neglect. A computerised search was undertaken of major electronic databases up to December 2005 using key search terms. Only systematic reviews were included in which the primary studies evaluated the effectiveness of targeted or indicated interventions for child physical abuse or neglect. A total of 31 systematic reviews were identified and 15 met all the inclusion criteria. They covered a range of interventions/services, including home visiting, parenting programmes, multi‐component interventions, intensive family preservation services, family‐focused casework and multi‐systemic family therapy. There was limited evidence of the effectiveness of services in improving objective measures of abuse and neglect, due in part to methodological issues involved in their measurement, but good evidence of modest benefits in improving a range of outcomes that are associated with physical abuse and neglect, including parental and family functioning and child development. The results also showed some interventions (eg. media‐based and perinatal coaching) to be ineffective with high‐risk families. The evidence provided by these reviews has clear implications for children's services in the UK and other western developed countries.

Nurse home visiting programmes designed to reduce the likelihood of child maltreatment in families at risk have been widely implemented in Australia and overseas. The purpose of this paper is to examine the intensity and duration of maternal involvement in a nurse home visiting programme to prevent child maltreatment.

A retrospective, longitudinal design was employed. The clinical records of 40 mothers who had received nurse home visits following the birth of a new baby for at least six months, and had provided consent for their details to be accessed for research purposes, were selected for analysis. The influence of antenatal characteristics and well-being on maternal involvement in a nurse home visiting programme was examined using reliability of change indices.

Mothers with impaired family functioning reporting they experienced violence at home were more likely to leave the programme early and received fewer than the prescribed number of home visits compared to mothers who had been enroled into the programme for other complex psychosocial needs. At the same time, mothers enroled on the basis of impaired psychological functioning and who did not report violence in the home remained, and received more than the prescribed number of home visits over the course of their involvement.

Results showed that domestic violence increased the risk of poor engagement with a targeted nurse home visiting programme. At the same time, home visitors responded to complex individual and family needs by increasing the number of home visits accordingly. This theoretically based pilot research has helped to disentangle antecedents of maternal involvement and the subsequent impact on programme outcomes. Further investigation using a larger study sample is needed.

The purpose of this paper is to first assess the long-term effects of the adaptation of the American Strengthening Families Programme in Spain (known as the Programa de Competencia Familiar, translated into English as the Family Competence Programme (FCP)). The second aim is to identify family typologies and family changes regarding family competence over time. The paper’s initial hypothesis is that families have different behaviours and take advantage of the FCP in different ways.

Monitored applications of the FCP were conducted using a quasi-experimental design consisting of a control group and pre-test, post-test and two-year follow-up assessments. The sample was made up of 136 families who took part in the programme and another 18 who participated in the control groups. Validated instruments were applied to assess the methodological processes and the family assessments. A cluster analysis was undertaken to identify different family typologies and their evolution in relation to the FCP goals.

The FCP shows effective and consistent results over time for families in a variety of difficult situations, with important result maintenance. The longitudinal analysis (i.e. the two-year follow-up) demonstrates that the majority of changes identified (using the factors under consideration) maintained their relevance for most of the families, producing positive change.

There is little long-term evaluation or longitudinal analysis of family prevention programmes that are evidence-based and include cognitive-emotional content. This paper analyses the long-term evaluation of family prevention programmes and identifies the ways in which families change over time.

The European Union‐supported Child and Adolescent Mental Health in an Enlarged Europe (CAMHEE) project aimed to provide an overview of the challenges, current practice and guidelines for developing effective mental health promotion and mental illness prevention policy and practice across Europe. As part of this work, an analysis was undertaken of the situation in England, making use of a bespoke data collection instrument and protocol.Our analysis suggests that there has been significant effort and investment in research, needs assessment, policy, human resource and service developments in CAMHS over the last 20 years, leading to a more detailed understanding and availability of services. Much of the emphasis has been on assessment and management of difficulties, however in recent years attention has begun to focus on mental health promotion. National standards and programmes such as Every Child Matters (Department for Education and Skills, 2004) have acted as catalysts for a number of national initiatives.