Home visiting is a widely used form of parenting support. The current study focused on the effectiveness of the home visiting volunteer parenting support programme Home-Start in the Netherlands. The Home-Start programme (intervention group) was compared to professional care as usual support (comparison group). The study focused on post-intervention changes of parental wellbeing, parenting behaviour and child problem behaviour within families with children in the age range of 1.5–3.5 years. Data were collected at the start of the interventions, at moment of support termination and at a six-month follow-up.
Findings
Eighty-six mothers from 24 Home-Start schemes were included in the intervention group (43 available at six-month follow-up) and 103 mothers from 18 care as usual sites in the comparison group (71 available at six-month follow-up). Mixed model analyses showed no or minor changes on the majority of selected outcome measures in both study groups. Significant improvements were only found for a few primary and secondary outcome measures. Additionally, there were indications of an increase in mother-reported behavioural difficulties of the children at post-test measurements, disappearing however at the six-month follow-up.
Applications
The current study showed that the volunteer programme Home-Start is an appealing intervention to families that appear to have higher needs. The study generated evidence that the results of the two types of evaluated interventions are comparable with little evidence of lasting changes.
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