Early Child Stimulation Through Parent Education. Final Report.

A project investigated a way in which early intervention into the lives of babies might break the poverty cycle. Major objectives were to find out whether the use of disadvantaged paraprofessional women as Parent Educators of indigent mothers of infants and young children enhanced the development of the children and increased the mother's competence and sense of self-worth. Parent Educators each assigned to a graduate student supervisor, received five weeks of intensive preservice training and one day of inservice training weekly. The major treatment variable was instruction of the mother by the Parent Educator in stimulation exercises once a week, in the home, on a regular basis. (Exercises consisted of a systematic series of perceptual-motor-auditory-tactile-kinesthetic inputs based upon a review of the theory and research on cognitive and affective development in the earliest years.) At the end of the first year, children whose mothers had been involved in the project were superior to control children on both the Griffiths Mental Development Scales and on the series material designed as teaching materials for the project. At the end of the second year children whose mothers had been in the project from the beginning or whose mothers entered the program when their child was one year of age were superior on the series material to control children. The second objective was partially achieved. (Implications are discussed.) (JS)