Describes an experimental treatment project with families reported or at risk for child abuse and neglect. Funded by the California Wellness Foundation, Project SafeCare takes an ecobehavioral approach, whereby treatment and assessment are conducted within the families’ social contexts of home, school, and other settings within the natural community. Project SafeCare focuses on 3 areas of intervention: home safety, including removing hazards and maintaining adequate sanitation; infant and child health care, including recognizing when a child is ill; and bonding to improve parent-child interactions. Training in these areas is conducted for 5 weeks each, for a total of 15 weeks. Study subjects were 115 primarily Latino families with a total of 204 children under the age of 5 years old. A series of inventories elicited from parents the presence of risk for physical abuse, depressive symptoms, life stressors, child behavior problems, and anger response. Findings regarding the efficacy of training activities suggest that: (1) direct treatment strategies as opposed to written assignments may achieve better outcomes, particularly when parents have inadequate reading and writing skills; and (2) further study is needed to determine whether training to improve the parent-child relationship will alleviate negligent mothers’ high levels of depression and stress. Useful findings in this article include: 1) the importance of direct behavioral assessment when an assessment tool hasn’t been validated for use with a particular cultural group, and 2) the importance of in-person services for populations with low educational attainment, rather than reliance on written assignments.
