Using home visits for multiple purposes: the Comprehensive Child Development Program

The Comprehensive Child Development Program (CCDP) was a two-generation program that employed case management and home visiting to assure low-income children and their parents of a range of educational, health, and social services. Designed to meet the complex needs of disadvantaged families, CCDP was predicted by its planners to generate positive short- and long-term effects across a variety of child and parent well-being indicators. This article describes the CCDP program and reviews the results of the program evaluation. The evaluation of 21 project sites and 4,410 families followed for five years found no statistically significant impact of CCDP on program families when they were compared with control families in any of the assessed domains: early childhood education, child and family health, parenting education, family economic self-sufficiency, or maternal life course. The authors conclude that the results of this evaluation do not support home visiting as an effective means of social service delivery and parenting education for low-income families.