Strenghthening
Families and Protecting Children from Substance Abuse
©
1999 Education Development Center, Inc.
A GUIDE FOR
PRACTITIONERS AND STATE AND LOCAL POLICYMAKERS
This
guide focuses on family factors and prevention on what families,
with the skill of practitioners, can do to support the healthy development
of their children and youth from birth (and even before) to age
17.
Family
support can be pivotal in helping children and adolescents as they
grow, develop new identities, make important decisions, and go in
new directions. Family capacity to overcome obstacles and
hardships and to nurture children effectively contribute significantly
to children's resiliency and buffer them from some of the most severe
challenges of adolescence.
Fortunately,
the science of prevention offers promising and practical steps that
practitioners can take with families to address the social behaviors
that contribute to substance abuse. Local practitioners, who work
with families and know the community's realities and resources,
are well positioned to bring about positive behavior changes in
individual children and youth, in their parents, and in the family
unit as a whole. They may play a pivotal role in altering
family behaviors that can lead to substance abuse in youth and in
improving the prospects for children as they grow.
How
this guide is organized
This
guide is intended to be practical and user-friendly. Its purpose
is to assist practitioners in selecting effective prevention strategies
and adopting, adapting, and/or designing programs that are likely
to achieve the outcomes they and their clients want.
Section
I describes relevant research and how it contributes to science-based
prevention.It looks at the ways in which our understanding of substance
abuse is guided by theories in several areas: public health, risk
and resiliency, family systems, community systems, and environmental
change. It presents protective and risk factors as they occur at
the level of the individual, family, peers, school, community, and
society.
Section
II focuses on five family-based strategies and the evidence that
supports them: (#1 #and 2) parent and family skills training, (#3)
family in-home support, (#4) family therapy, and (#5) prenatal and
early childhood intervention.
Section
III offers a series of guidelines for implementing family-based
programs for practitioners who want to adapt and apply these strategies
in their local programs.
The
Conclusion looks beyond the family-based strategies to provide an
overview of steps that parents can take to improve the family climate
in ways that contribute to prevention.
Appendix
A provides a list of resources, including selected family-based
programs. Appendix B suggests ways that individuals — both
practitioners and the families they work with — can influence
larger environmental factors beyond the family that affect substance
abuse problems; it addresses policy, enforcement, education, communication,
and collaboration.
Because
of the length of the paper, this document has been divided into
seven sections and posted in HTML and Acrobat. Help on Acrobat is available
Introduction
(Webpage, Acrobat 15
pages)
Section
1: Science-Based Prevention (Webpage,
Acrobat 14 pages)
Section
2: Family-Based Strategies (Webpage,
Acrobat 37 pages)
Section
3: Guidelines for Implementing Family-Based Programs (Webpage,
Acrobat 15 pages)
Conclusion:
Looking Beyond the Five Family-Based Strategies and Endnotes (Webpage, Acrobat 14
pages)
Appendix
A: Resources, References and Program List (Webpage,
Acrobat
43 pages)
Appendix
B: Improving the Larger Environment (Webpage,
Acrobat 16 pages)
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