Study Shows Visits by Nurses Help Young Families Adjust, Thrive

As a pediatric nurse practitioner in the late 1960s, Harriet Kitzman noticed that she made a difference in the lives of the families she visited.

Now the Loretta Ford Professor of Nursing, Kitzman has new evidence that home visits to young, pregnant women help not only children but their mothers and their families as well.

In a study published last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Kitzman and researchers at the Colorado Health Sciences Center have shown that a program of home visits promotes self-sufficiency among young, struggling families.

The study tracked 1,139 young mothers in Memphis, Tennessee, during the early 1990s.

The results showed that families who were visited spent fewer months on welfare and food stamps. The mothers also had fewer subsequent pregnancies and longer intervals between the births of their first and second child, and their family structure was more stable compared to the families who were not visited.

The results mirrored the findings of Kitzman and developmental psychologist David Olds, formerly on the University faculty and now at the University of Colorado. The two teamed up 20 years ago for a study of home visits in Elmira, New York.

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