#97. How to Best Help the Most Vulnerable Children? Start Before They're Even Born!

David Olds is a professor at the Pediatrics-Prevention Research Center at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. He has devoted his long and distinguished career to the developing and testing of very early interventions in family and child functioning, starting prenatally and continuing through toddler age. After devoting decades to high quality, random assignment, longitudinal, comparison studies – showing the approach yielded dramatic benefits – Dr. Olds went on to win grant after grant, to implement what came to be called the Nurse-Family-Partnership program, now in 40 states and 8 foreign countries, today serving close to 40,000 families in the U.S. and 18,000 families abroad. The program has shown positive, substantial, long-term effects in the prevention of child abuse and neglect, school failure, injuries, depression, anxiety and anti-social behavior in children. Research from Nurse-Family-Partnership program (https://www.nursefamilypartnership.org/) have served as the primary evidentiary foundation for a $2.3B federal investment in evidence-based home visiting.

Recorded 5/3/21.