Enhancing home visits to promote parents’ sensitive scaffolding among families living in poverty

This study examined how different groups of families responded to participation in the Recipe 4 Success preventive intervention and what happened to families after the intervention ended. Recipe 4 Success was designed to promote parents’ sensitive scaffolding of toddlers’ self-regulation among families living in poverty. It was embedded within 12 weekly Early Head Start home visits and tested against usual practice home visits in a randomized controlled trial (N = 242 families; 37% white, 25% Black, 19% Latino, 17% Multiracial, 2% Asian American; median monthly income = $1,555). Latent profile analysis of observations of parent-child interactions identified three groups of families in which parents were relatively low, moderate, or high in sensitive scaffolding. Latent transition analysis revealed that 58% of the Recipe 4 Success parents who were in the Lower Sensitive Scaffolding profile at baseline transitioned to the Moderate Sensitive Scaffolding profile at post-intervention, compared to only 15% of control group parents who made a similar transition. Importantly, most families sustained the positive changes they made while participating in Recipe 4 Success throughout the nine months after the end of the intervention. As such, this study yields a nuanced understanding of who benefits from a new intervention and ways we can enhance home visits to better serve families living in poverty.