Embedding the Family Check Up and Evidence-Based Parenting Programs in Head Start to Increase Parent Engagement and...

Parent engagement (i.e., enrollment, ongoing attendance, participation quality) remains a major obstacle to fully realizing the benefits of evidence-based preventive parent management training in community settings. We describe an approach to parent engagement that addresses the myriad motivational, cognitive, and pragmatic barriers parents face by embedding services in Head Start and applying a parent engagement model, the Family Check Up, as a pre-intervention to augment parent training. In this article, we present the rationale for applying FCU to advance parent readiness for engagement and we describe the process by which we partnered with the community to modify FCU to be most impactful for enhancing parent engagement in one specific program, the Incredible Years Parenting Series. We conclude with preliminary data from our ongoing pilot trial that supports our approach.