Early Childhood Home Visits are Vital for Strengthening American Families, Witnesses Tell House Education Committee
Experts Urge Passage of Bipartisan Legislation that Would Expand Access to Supportive Parenting Services

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

WASHINGTON, DC -- At a hearing on Capitol Hill today, witnesses urged the House Education and Labor Committee to pass bipartisan legislation that would allow more families to benefit from programs that help prepare young children for school, prevent child abuse and neglect, and provide parents with much needed support when raising infants and young children.

The legislation, the Education Begins At Home Act (H.R. 2343), would expand access to quality of early childhood home visitation programs, which provide families with services that promote positive parenting skills and reduce parenting stress, boost children’s school readiness, and encourage parents to stay actively involved in their children’s education.

“Preparing children for success in school and in life begins in the home,” said U.S. Rep. George Miller (D-CA), the chairman of the committee. “This legislation is about strengthening and supporting families – an investment that we know will help more children arrive at school ready to learn and build a brighter, more competitive future for this country.”

“Our children deserve every opportunity and all of the help we can provide for them and their families to get off to a healthy start toward realization of all their potential,” said U.S. Rep. Danny K. Davis (D-IL), a member of the committee who introduced the bill along with U.S. Rep. Todd Platts (R-PA). “Home visitation provides much of that help.”

The bill would create, for the first time, a federal funding stream to help states and communities better plan for and provide quality services to families. In addition, the bill would create competitive grant programs to expand access to home visitation services for military families and families with limited-English proficiency, and it would help states create partnerships between programs and related community services.

As experts at today’s hearing explained, early childhood home visitation programs are instrumental in helping to improve student achievement, reduce child abuse rates, improve early identification of developmental delays and disabilities, and improve access to health services, and foster the parent-child bonds that are crucial to healthy child development.

“Children and youth with involved and supportive parents from birth through adolescence do better in many ways.  They are more ready to succeed in school, and they get better grades, have higher graduation rates, and are more likely to go to college,” said Heather B. Weiss, Ed.D., the Founder and Director of the Harvard Family Research Project. “The Education Begins At Home Act, providing funding for states to develop, deliver and evaluate home visitation as a core component of early childhood services, is a key piece of the national effort to insure that all children succeed for several reasons.”

Julie Fenley, whose husband serves in the U.S. Navy, told the committee how Terrilyn Williams, the parent educator she worked with through the Parents as Teachers program, helped her cope with parenting stresses while her husband was away for training: “When Zane was born he had a serious medical condition called PPHN also known as pulmonary hypertension in newborns. The physicians told me he could possibly suffer from neurodevelopment issues. I was terrified and so worried that this could be the reason why Zane wasn't talking all that well. Terrilyn calmly talked with me about my concerns and referred me to local resource professionals that could do further testing on Zane. If it weren't for Terrilyn I would not have found those resources on my own.”

Several witnesses cited research showing that home visitation programs, like the Nurse-Family Partnership, which helped significantly lower rates of child abuse, can also bring significant financial benefits for taxpayers.

“Preventing child abuse and neglect is not only the right thing to do, it is also the fiscally sound thing to do. Analysts with the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis concluded that NFP produced an average of five dollars in savings for every dollar invested, and produced more than $28,000 in net savings for every high-risk family in the program.” said Laura A. Ditka, the Deputy District Attorney in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, who also highlighted the need for the increased funding for programs. “Due to lack of funding, hundreds of thousands of at-risk families do not receive quality home visiting,” she continued.

“The RAND and Washington State reports weighed the costs and benefits of NFP and concluded that the program produces significant benefits for children and their parents, and demonstrated a savings to government in lower costs for health care, child protection, education, criminal justice, mental health, government assistance and higher taxes paid by employed parents,” said Jeanne Smart, the Director of the Nurse-Family Partnership in Los Angeles County.

“Everyday, I see the tremendous impact that quality early childhood home visitation has on the families in my community,” said Makeda London, the Healthy Families Program Manager and Family Support Services Coordinator for the Near North Health Service Corporation in Chicago. “In a time of limited resources, the federal government has the responsibility to make wise investments in services that have been tested and found to be effective. The Education Begins at Home Act honors this responsibility by supporting the highest-quality home visitation services.”

For more information on the Education Begins At Home Act, click here.

For more information on today’s hearing, click here.

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