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Strengthening Families and Protecting Children from Substance Abuse

© 1999 Education Development Center, Inc.

A GUIDE FOR PRACTITIONERS AND STATE AND LOCAL POLICYMAKERS

This guide focuses on family factors and prevention on what families, with the skill of practitioners, can do to support the healthy development of their children and youth from birth (and even before) to age 17.

Family support can be pivotal in helping children and adolescents as they grow, develop new identities, make important decisions, and go in new directions.   Family capacity to overcome obstacles and hardships and to nurture children effectively contribute significantly to children's resiliency and buffer them from some of the most severe challenges of adolescence.

Fortunately, the science of prevention offers promising and practical steps that practitioners can take with families to address the social behaviors that contribute to substance abuse. Local practitioners, who work with families and know the community's realities and resources, are well positioned to bring about positive behavior changes in individual children and youth, in their parents, and in the family unit as a whole.  They may play a pivotal role in altering family behaviors that can lead to substance abuse in youth and in improving the prospects for children as they grow.

How this guide is organized

This guide is intended to be practical and user-friendly. Its purpose is to assist practitioners in selecting effective prevention strategies and adopting, adapting, and/or designing programs that are likely to achieve the outcomes they and their clients want.

Section I describes relevant research and how it contributes to science-based prevention.It looks at the ways in which our understanding of substance abuse is guided by theories in several areas: public health, risk and resiliency, family systems, community systems, and environmental change. It presents protective and risk factors as they occur at the level of the individual, family, peers, school, community, and society.

Section II focuses on five family-based strategies and the evidence that supports them: (#1 #and 2) parent and family skills training, (#3) family in-home support, (#4) family therapy, and (#5) prenatal and early childhood intervention.

Section III offers a series of guidelines for implementing family-based programs for practitioners who want to adapt and apply these strategies in their local programs.

The Conclusion looks beyond the family-based strategies to provide an overview of steps that parents can take to improve the family climate in ways that contribute to prevention.

Appendix A provides a list of resources, including selected family-based programs. Appendix B suggests ways that individuals — both practitioners and the families they work with — can influence larger environmental factors beyond the family that affect substance abuse problems; it addresses policy, enforcement, education, communication, and collaboration.

Because of the length of the paper, this document has been divided into seven sections and posted in HTML and Acrobat. Help on Acrobat is available

Introduction (Webpage, Acrobat 15 pages)

Section 1: Science-Based Prevention (Webpage,  Acrobat 14 pages)

Section 2: Family-Based Strategies (Webpage, Acrobat 37 pages)

Section 3: Guidelines for Implementing Family-Based Programs (Webpage, Acrobat 15 pages)

Conclusion: Looking Beyond the Five Family-Based Strategies and Endnotes (Webpage, Acrobat 14 pages) 

Appendix A: Resources, References and Program List (Webpage, Acrobat 43 pages)

Appendix B: Improving the Larger Environment (Webpage, Acrobat 16 pages)