Raising Healthy Children: Building Strong Connections Between Children, Families & Schools

Monday, April 14. 12:00pm-1:30pm. Rainier Room.

Description

The elementary grades are an essential time to ensure that all children learn the fundamentals for life: reading, writing, math, and how to get along with others. Elementary schools are the seedbeds of democracy. Come learn about “Raising Healthy Children,” a school-based program that empowers teachers, parents and young people to work together to develop children’s cognitive and social emotional skills at school and at home during the elementary grades. The program has produced long-term effects on positive adult functioning, civic engagement, and mental health of participants through age 27, fifteen years after program participation ended. Review results of the research, and apply the social development strategy, the tested foundation of Raising Healthy Children.

Presenter Bios 

J. David Hawkins, PhD, University of Washington

Dr. J. David Hawkins is the Endowed Professor of Prevention and Founding Director of the Social Development Research Group, School of Social Work, University of Washington, Seattle. He received his B.A. in 1967 from Stanford University and his Ph.D. in Sociology from Northwestern University in 1975. His research focuses on understanding and preventing child and adolescent health and behavior problems. He seeks to identify risk and protective factors for health and behavior problems across multiple domains; to understand how these factors interact in the development of healthy behavior and the prevention of problem behaviors. He develops and tests prevention strategies which seek to reduce risk through the enhancement of strengths and protective factors in families, schools, and communities. He is principal investigator of the Seattle Social Development Project, a longitudinal study testing strategies for promoting successful development with 808 Seattle elementary school students since 1981. He is also principal investigator of the Community Youth Development Study, a randomized field experiment involving 24 communities across seven states testing the effectiveness of the Communities That Care prevention system developed by Hawkins and Richard F. Catalano. He has authored numerous articles and several books as well as prevention programs for parents and families, including Guiding Good Choices, Parents Who Care, and Supporting School Success. His prevention work is guided by the social development model, his theory of human behavior.  

Kevin P. Haggerty, MSW, University of Washington

For nearly 20 years, Kevin Haggerty, MSW and his colleagues at the Social Development Research Group have been developing methods to organize the scientific knowledge base for prevention in ways that empower parents, communities and schools to use it to organize, assess and prioritize approaches that meet their needs. Mr. Haggerty, MSW, is a faculty member at the Social Development Research Group, University of Washington, School of Social Work. He is an early implementer and trainer of the Guiding Good Choices parenting program. He is Principal Investigator of the NIDA-funded Family Connections study, testing the efficacy of Parents Who Care, and the Focus on Families study. He is also an investigator of the Community Youth Development Study. Mr. Haggerty has specialized in the development and implementation of prevention programs at the community, school and family levels, including the co-development and testing of the Focus on Families program for parents in methadone treatment, the school-based Raising Healthy Children program and the Communities that Care operating system for community prevention planning. Mr. Haggerty is an international trainer and speaker in the areas of substance abuse and delinquency prevention and has written extensively in the field.