Promoting family school-readiness for child-welfare involved preschoolers and their caregivers: Case examples

The Strategies for Enhancing Early Developmental Success (SEEDS) Preschool Program aims to promote school readiness in families connected to the child welfare system by enhancing children's self-regulation, parents' engagement in their children's early learning experiences, and parent/child/teacher relationships. Given high levels of prenatal alcohol exposure and early adversity in welfare-connected children, the SEEDS Program integrates evidence-based interventions for fetal alcohol spectrum disorders and early childhood stress and trauma. From an early education perspective, an innovative aspect of the program is the conceptualization of school readiness as occurring at the family level; in SEEDS, parental participation is as intensive as children's participation, both during dyadic activities and in a separate but highly coordinated parent group curriculum. To illustrate design and implementation of the program, the current paper uses parent- and teacher-reported data to summarize the progress of three participating families with diverse histories and presenting issues. Each individual family's response to intervention was examined (1) by calculating individual reliable change index scores using pre- and post-intervention reports on standardized measures of child adjustment and parental stress, and (2) by plotting the time series of teacher-reported progress on family goals over the course of the program. Although emotional, behavioral, and executive functioning difficulties appeared to initially interfere with children's engagement in learning material, enhancing social-emotional functioning at the level of the parent, child, and the dyad addressed many of the parent- and teacher-identified intervention goals. Consideration of mixed outcomes in one of the three cases highlights areas of improvement for future implementations of the SEEDS Program.