Eldridge is a registered nurse with the Nurse-Family Partnership, a national nonprofit program designed to improve the health and lives of low-income, first-time moms and their kids. Eldridge has been visiting Johnson, who lives at her mother's home in Olney, every few weeks since the teenager voluntarily signed up early in her pregnancy. The meetings will continue until Zahara - "Zaza" - is 2.
The partnership, now serving more than 20,000 families in 20 states including Pennsylvania and New Jersey, is one of the few social programs that has been scientifically shown to work. Rigorous, long-term studies found that it not only helps young mothers with parenting skills, it reduces child abuse, welfare use, arrests and substance abuse, while improving education and employment rates. Children, in turn, are less likely to have serious behavior problems.
It's also one of the few programs to resist chances for rapid growth. David Olds, director of the University of Colorado's Prevention Research Center for Family and Child Health, spent nearly 25 years testing the model in Elmira, N.Y.; Memphis, Tenn.; and Denver before accepting federal funds to expand in 1996.
"Many people took our results and said, 'Home visiting works,' " Olds, 57, said last month during a trip to Philadelphia, where the program was set up five years ago. "We didn't want to replicate it too quickly because the initial results might not hold up."
That idea - that social programs should have evidence that they work, just like new drugs - is catching on among policymakers and scientists.
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Home visits have long been a standard part of social service programs. What makes the partnership more effective - not to mention more costly - is the reliance on nurses, program officials say.
