Parent Child Home Program

PCHP is a home visiting program launched in 1965, that aims to strengthen families and increase school readiness for young children through a culturally appropriate program model that promotes literacy, language, and social-emotional development by way of positive parenting and parent-child verbal interaction. 

In the two-year program, families are enrolled when children are around two years old and receive two 30-minute home visits per week for 23 weeks a year from a trained home visitor, for a total of 92 visits.  Home visitors, who share language and cultural backgrounds with the families, use a nondirective approach by modeling behaviors that enhance children's development.  Visits are structured around the use of Verbal Interaction Stimulus Materials (VISM)-high-quality, developmentally appropriate toys or books-which are brought by the home visitors and left as gifts for the families to use on their own.  

Nationwide, PCHP has been evaluated by several independent organizations during its 50-year history and locally, ORS Impact has been evaluating the program since it was first implemented in King County in 2006.  The evaluation assesses changes in parents and children at four-time points during the two-year program: baseline, end of Year 1, beginning of Year 2, and end of program.  

In 2016, we also conducted an evaluation of long-term outcomes across a diverse cohort of PCHP graduates and a series of six focus groups with parents who had participated in PCHP in King County.  The long-term outcomes evaluation examined the performance of PCHP graduates against a demographically matched comparison group on standardized assessments of school readiness, English proficiency, and Grade 3 academic performance.  The focus groups were intended to explore the parent experience of the program, particularly their perception of program recruitment and retention, school readiness, and any beneficial effects the program had on their non-enrolled children and family members.