The Peer Support Program is designed to provide students with a
supportive learning
environment in which to develop the skills, understandings,
attitudes and strategies to make healthy life decisions.
Analyses of findings from an earlier intensive child development program for low birth weight children and their parents (the Infant Health and Development Program) suggest that the cognitive effects for the children were mediated through the effects on parents, and the effects on parents accounted for between 20 and 50 % of the child effects.10 A recent analysis of the Chicago Child Parent Centers, an early education program with a parent support component, examined the factors responsible for the program's significant long - term effects on increasing rates of school completion and decreasing rates of juvenile arrest.11 The authors conducted analyses to test alternative hypotheses about the pathways from the short - term significant effects on children's educational achievement at the end of preschool to these long - term effects, including (a) that the cognitive and language stimulation children experienced
in the centres led to a sustained cognitive advantage that produced the long - term effects on the students» behaviour; or (b) that the enhanced parenting practices,
attitudes, expectations and involvement
in children's education that occurred early
in the program led to sustained changes
in the home
environments that made them more
supportive of school achievement and behavioural norms, which
in turn produced the long - term effects on the students» behaviour.