Other Evidence-Based Interventions in the Prevention of Child Maltreatment
When primary caregivers have limitations in their ability to ensure around-the-clock safety to children under their care, surrogate caregiving environments, including high-quality child care and foster care, become lifelines for families. These expensive propositions are often reserved for the aftermath of a first incidence of abuse or neglect, but novel interventions that enhance the level of sensitive-responsive care by surrogates in such environments are proving capable of promoting resilience in youth at risk and improved outcomes for their families.33 Note that, in a large administrative-data study of chronic, official-report child abuse or neglect, Jonson-Reid and colleagues34 showed that children who experienced a single episode of official-report maltreatment, but no further occurrences, incurred rates of mental health care use that were not significantly increased compared with those of children in the general population. Thus, interventions designed to prevent child maltreatment recidivism (discussed later) are as important and potentially potent as those that are designed to prevent its initial incidence. Kessler and colleagues35 showed significant reductions in adult mental disorders among foster care alumni (primarily school aged) who had been assigned to a model program in which their case managers had higher levels of training and lower caseloads than was customary for usual foster care. The outcomes of other efforts to enhance the foster caregiving environment (eg, via multidimensional treatment foster care, a wrap-around multimodal intervention for foster families of children and adolescents with challenging behavior) have been promising and warrant further study.35, 36