Hey,

remember that really lame research paper that we had to critique in Dr Stannard's class, the one about the pilot program in northern New Jersey where nurses did home visits with at-risk young moms and mentored them on prenatal health and then how to be good moms for the first two years of their baby's life, at which point the moms "graduated" from the program? Well, that type of program has a name-- Nurse-Family Partnerships (NFPs)-- and such programs have been going on in various forms since 1977. How do I know this? This month's American Journal of Nursing contains no less than three separate articles about NFPs. Did you know, for instance, that California has 8 counties with NFP programs? Oklahoma has a whopping 77 (who knew Oklahoma even had 77 counties?!). The idea for NFPs came to a dude named Robert Olds in 1970 when he got his first job out of college at a day care center (let me guess-- liberal arts major). He observed that "...impoverished, chaotic home environments in which parents abused drugs and alcohol and parents were hostile, rejecting, or neglectful..." corelated to negative outcomes in early childhood development. Laughably obvious to us now, but remember, it was 1970. What's even cooler is that he went on to flesh out the concept-- that of mentoring at-risk moms during their spawn's first couple of years-- at the College of Human Ecology at Cornell University, run by guess who? That's right, the social ecology guru himself, Urie Bronfenbrenner; the same theorist who more than one of us in the MSN program has yoked our Culminating Experiences to, and the same theorist so well-regarded and well-utilized by our beloved Professor van Dam in her own research. The guy who gave us the tome "Human Ecology: Experiements by Nature and by Design," the perect fusion of 70s eco-wholism and post-Skinner behaviorism; the est-fueled hope of groovy self-actualization tempered by the Russian eidos of Stalinist social control. he of "the human psychosocial landscape being analogous to Russian matryoshka dolls" fame. That guy. Ya gotta love him! And Columbia, the most hippie-fied of Ivy League schools of the era, loved him so much, they gave him his own damn college! Forget about my nursing field study, I wanna research Urie!

So anyhow, the crappy Newark-based mentor program we read about (5 counties in NJ have NFP programs, by the way) was just a splinter cell of something so huge and well-studied that the Rand Corporation has determined that a typical NFP intervention has a net benefit of $34,148 to society per family served. That means a return of $5.70 for every dollar invested in NFP. Holy stock options, no wonder Oklahoma's all over it!

Getting back to theory-mongering, the second theoretical frameworker pulling the levers behind NFPs is-- right again!-- Albert Bandura and the embracing bosom of self-efficacy theory! Again, more than one of us is leaning heavily on Mr. Bandura for their field study. And who doesn't love Bandura? His theory could be subtitled "how not to be a f***-up." In fact, let me be the first to say it: Human Ecology and Self-Efficacy are your helpful hippie pals when it comes to theoretical framework building!