Home visiting is used as a strategy to deliver services to families in their homes. The visits may be designed to prevent or reduce a variety of problems.
The federal government evaluates voluntary home visiting programs for families with children up through age 5 to determine if they are “evidence-based.”
The voluntary nature of such programs is important (page 3):
Although home visiting models vary in their goals, services, and target populations, all share criteria that are critical to their success:
1. Participation is voluntary. Parents who sign up for home visiting services do so of their own accord, demonstrating an emotional buy-in that increases engagement and success. Research shows that voluntary participation encourages a sense of pride in adults, who know they are choosing to do something good for themselves and their family, as opposed to the stigma associated with court-ordered and other nonvoluntary programs.
We would not expect nonvoluntary, adversarial home visiting programs to have the same outcomes as voluntary programs.
There is apparently no research base evaluating outcomes of nonvoluntary home visiting programs. Evidence-based nonvoluntary early childhood home visiting programs appear to be nonexistent.
So it is not possible to implement an “evidence-based” nonvoluntary early childhood home visiting program, given the current research base.