Building Stronger Families to Prevent Child Maltreatment

In the past, the prevention of child maltreatment centered on identifying children who had been abused, protecting them, and punishing the perpetrators. Our current understanding finds that Child maltreatment prevention presents a very complex and difficult set of challenges; maltreatment itself has enormous lifelong health consequences for individuals and fiscal consequences for the nation. Upstream factors represent a balance between risk and promotion factors. The prevention of child maltreatment requires an understanding of individual, community, and social-ecological levels of intervention. This new approach, exemplified by the new Essentials of Childhood framework, results in a changed perspective in prevention, recognizing that we are all part of the same community, face the same sets of challenges, and have similar needs in order to support ourselves, our families and our communities. This approach underlines current prevention work in multiple sectors: Child welfare agencies implement the Strengthening Families framework, pediatricians utilize Bright Futures, and there is increasing public support for high quality early childhood education. The implications of this new perspective include thinking explicitly about aligning the goals, messages and measures of early childhood support including healthcare, early intervention, and early childhood education to maximize collective impact.