In addition to providing education and advice, the home visitor can be an important link between the family and community services and supports. Some states now offer voluntary home visiting services to all new parents and provide more intensive services to at-risk families with young children. Especially effective are comprehensive prenatal and infant services, in which trained nurses or paraprofessionals visit unmarried, adolescent, uneducated, or low-income mothers and their children. These programs have successfully encouraged expectant mothers to stop smoking, eat a balanced diet, use the WIC nutrition supplementation program, and seek childbirth education. In families that have been visited, the incidence of low-birthweight babies, child abuse and neglect, and childhood injuries has decreased.
Home visiting programs are also cost-effective.
The task force recommends that home visiting services be offered on a voluntary basis as part of comprehensive health services to all first-time parents and their newborns. More intensive home visiting services would have the greatest benefit if offered to all families in communities with high rates of poverty and large numbers of single, young mothers. These voluntary services could help those most likely to benefit without singling out any particular mother or child in the neighborhood. Their Health Unintentional injuries remain the leading cause of death among children aged one to four. Children growing up in poverty are more likely to die from an unintentional injury than children from better-off families.