Magistrate Patricia Young had an 11-year-old boy in her court recently for "acting out" - and no wonder.
His mother was 16 when he was born, unmarried but living with the child's father. There were alcohol and marijuana problems."Obviously, she didn't know how to parent this little child," says Young, who handles domestic violence cases involving all too many young couples with small babies.
"Now that he's 11, he's acting out, and that's no surprise," she says. "He has some possibly severe learning disabilities and doesn't have a very good sense of what's right and wrong. It's a very bad situation."
At 11, Young admits, it is difficult to turn things around and keep the boy from costing society a lot of money caring for him later.
But Young and others in the Healthy Families Idaho Initiative Task Force believe that by intervening much earlier through intense home visits parents can learn how to parent and vulnerable infants can grow into healthy, adjusted children.
"If we say we support the family and we want to nurture families, we just need to do some upfront stuff . . . so we can help them be good, nurturing parents instead of getting mad at them after the fact," Young says.
It isn't cheap, however.
Hawaii, which pioneered the "Healthy Families" concept, spends about $11,000 to provide weekly visits through the first five years of a child's life. But in over 99 percent of the cases, the state reports children have not been abused or neglected - things experts believe significantly contribute to later criminal behavior.
That payoff is enormous when it means a jail cell isn't filled at an average annual cost of $14,000 - $20,000 for maximum security.
In Hawaii, the intervention program is voluntary, and social agencies and hospitals are generally looking for signals that indicate a family could be a good candidate at the time a child is born. That's when parents seem most receptive to the idea of weekly visits with a trained professional.
Parents are asked whether the pregnancy was planned, the degree of prenatal care, their employment status, marital status and how the relationship is going.
When the family seems to be doing well, the visits taper off to monthly, and Hawaii's experience indicates that once children reach age 5, they face little prospect of being abused and are developmentally on track.
The task force plans to educate local officials about the program.