Impacts of a Home Visiting Program Enhanced with Content on Healthy Birth Spacing

Area of Science:

• Public Health
• Maternal and Child Health
• Adolescent Health

Background:

• Teen parents face unique challenges in parenting and reproductive health.
• The Healthy Families Healthy Futures (HFHF) program is a home visiting intervention designed to support young parents.
• Enhancements to HFHF, such as Steps to Success (STS), aim to further improve outcomes for teen mothers.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the impact of the HFHF program enhanced with STS on young mothers.
• To assess the program's effectiveness in improving parenting skills, preventing child abuse, and reducing repeat pregnancies.
• To determine the program's influence on contraception knowledge, use, family functioning, and child development.

Main Methods:

• A randomized controlled trial was conducted with 248 young mothers in Houston.
• Participants were assigned to either the HFHF enhanced with STS treatment group or a control group.
• Outcomes were measured via survey at 12 months post-intake, using regression analyses and Bayesian probabilities.

Main Results:

• The HFHF enhanced with STS program significantly increased exposure to information on parenting and birth control.
• There was an 85% Bayesian probability of a favorable effect on these information domains.
• While not statistically significant, there was a 77% probability of increased long-acting reversible contraceptive (LARC) use.

Conclusions:

• The findings are largely favorable and align with the program's objectives for teen parents.
• Smaller sample sizes due to recruitment challenges may have limited the detection of statistically significant effects.
• Bayesian posterior probabilities offer valuable insights for interpreting impact estimates, suggesting further research is warranted.