Parenting is one of the toughest and most important jobs anyone will ever have. Healthy Families encourages and supports parents by building on their strengths to help provide a healthy start for parents and their children. The Healthy Families Program is a voluntary, comprehensive home visitation program for families of newborns and can provide services for multiple years.  The program offers frequent home visits, information to parents on child development, positive parent-child interaction, and linkages to other community resources.

Healthy Families produces tangible results!

• A study recently released by Auditor General Douglas Norton reported that Arizona's three-year-old Healthy Families program has "reduced child abuse, improved children's health care and cut dependence on welfare."
• Nearly 97 percent of families who received at least six months of services had no substantiated reports of child abuse, the report said. A comparison group of families, by contrast, reported being abuse-free 92 percent of the time.
• For example, the average number of days a Healthy Families participant received food stamps was 910, vs. 1,110 days for others. The length of time on welfare also was substantially less: 771 days for Healthy Families enrollees against 892 for the comparison group.
• Norton found other benefits, including higher immunization rates for children in the program than for the community at large.

Source: The Arizona Daily Star

Healthy Families program is credentialed through Prevent Child Abuse America (http://www.preventchildabuse.org)