Innovative Approaches to Supporting Families of Young Children

??This book adopts a systems-contextual view of supporting families of young children. It incorporates contributions from scholars and policy makers to provide a wide range of approaches. Chapters cover supports at the family, school, community, neighborhood, and systems/policy levels of the social ecology. Each of these approaches has the ability to support families of young children while having unique benefits and challenges. Professionals in social work, psychology, public policy, and public health who work to support families of young children will find this book useful.

Cheri Shapiro, PhD, is a Research Associate Professor and Associate Director of the Institute for Families in Society at the University of South Carolina. She is a licensed clinical psychologist with over 20 years of experience in direct service, administrative, and research settings. Her research interests include implementation of evidence-based parenting interventions and prevention of a range of maladaptive outcomes in youth including behavioral problems, child maltreatment, and delinquency. Dr. Shapiro served as Project Director of the federally funded U.S. Triple P System Population Trial and Principal Investigator of The Family Networks Project, a federally funded research and demonstration project designed to examine strategies for strengthening families and preventing child maltreatment in young children with disabilities. Recent projects include examining the impact of incarceration on families, risk factors in criminal justice populations, evidence-based parenting programs for children with disabilities, and brief parenting interventions. Charlyn Harper Browne, PhD, is a Senior Associate at the Center for the Study of Social Policy (CSSP). At CSSP, Dr. Browne has served as Project Director of the National Quality Improvement Center on Early Childhood and is a member of two other project teams: the “Strengthening Families Initiative” and the “Youth Thrive—Healthy Adolescent Development and Well-Being” project. In both cases, she is primarily responsible for synthesizing and contributing to the research base that is foundational to the projects. Prior to joining CSSP, Browne served as a college professor and administrator for 32 years teaching in undergraduate psychology departments and graduate counseling departments. Her educational background includes extensive post-graduate studies in clinical child and family psychology after earning a doctoral degree in early childhood education.