This interview followed the presentation "The Nurse-Family Partnership: From Trials to International Replication" given as part of NIJ's Research for the Real World Series by David Olds, Ph.D., Director, Prevention Research Center for Family & Child Health, University of Colorado, Denver.

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The Nurse-Family Partnership: From Trials to International Replication

This interview followed the presentation "The Nurse-Family Partnership: From Trials to International Replication" given as part of NIJ's Research for the Real World Series by David Olds, Ph.D., Director, Prevention Research Center for Family & Child Health, University of Colorado, Denver.

David Olds: The Nurse-Family Partnership is a program of prenatal and infancy home visiting by nurses, which nurses begin working with low-income mothers having their first babies as early in pregnancy as possible, and they follow them through the child's second year of life.

The nurses have three major goals. The first is to help women improve the outcomes of pregnancy by helping them improve their prenatal health. That is, cutting down on the use of toxic substances like alcohol and tobacco that can compromise the developing fetal brain. They also are charged with helping parents improve their children's subsequent health and development by helping parents provide more competent care of the baby in the first two years of life. We're particularly concerned about preventing child abuse and neglect — both because it's wrong, but it also has long-lasting impacts on children's capacity for behavioral regulation.

To have been visited by nurses and who were more socially disadvantaged, by virtue of they're being unmarried and coming from low socioeconomic households at registration, were substantially less likely to use welfare, to have greater spacing between the birth of first and second children. There were indications that they were — and the children themselves were less likely to have been abused or neglected. And what we see is that the effects for girls at age 19 are most pronounced where those girls were born into households where the mothers were low-income and unmarried at registration.

And so there is a certain, if you want, cross-generational impact of the program for girls born to mothers who are a particular social risk at registration. And we know that children who start using substances earlier are at much greater risk for later depression and violence, and so it gives us some reason to be hopeful that the intervention in Memphis is going to have effects on more serious criminalities as the children reach mid-adolescence.

I think that the message for people who are working in criminal justice policy is that pregnancy in the early years of the child's life matter. And there are conditions that exist during pregnancy and the early years of the child's life that can have a profound effect on the child's risk for behavioral disregulation that leads to early substance use, early antisocial behavior, and that a case, I think, can be made for justice to help fund some of these kinds of services that have proven effectiveness because of the impacts — the long-term impacts on children's behavioral regulation, functioning and involvement with the criminal justice system.