The Bedside Box of Play is a kit of play activities designed specifically for children experiencing hospitalization. 30 kits were delivered to the Child Life unit at a local hospital with materials provided in English and Spanish. It is a free resource informed by research to maximize the potential for healthy coping during a time that may be stressful or overwhelming. Activities were created intentionally to allow for creativity, direction of the activity by the child, and family engagement. My hope for the Bedside Box of play is that it provides children and families with an easy way to incorporate play into the hospital environment, while also promoting healthy child development and building coping skills to be used post-discharge. This creative project also outlines a potential framework for helping professionals to make play effective and accessible in a variety of settings.

Child abuse and neglect is a devastating yet preventable social problem. Currently, early childhood home visitation services are the primary approach to preventing maltreatment and improving child well-being in the United States. However, existing literature suggests that improvement is needed regarding how home visitation professionals identify and respond to risk factors for child abuse and neglect. Although there is substantial multidisciplinary literature that investigates the utility of standardized measures to determine future risk for maltreatment, there has been minimal inquiry into the validity of early childhood home visitation assessment instruments to accurately identify and classify children and their families by their risk for future maltreatment. In response to the dearth in the literature, the purpose of this dissertation was to examine the utility of the Healthy Families Parenting Inventory (HFPI) to predict a family’s risk for future maltreatment. Families enrolled in Healthy Families Arizona, a child abuse and neglect prevention program, were followed for 12 months after the completion of the baseline HFPI to measure if the family had received an investigation of maltreatment from the public child welfare system. Bivariate results indicated that the generated risk classifications of the HFPI and the overall total composite score were related to the occurrence of a future maltreatment investigation. Specifically, the results from the binary logistic regression models provided evidence that as a family’s score increased on the inventory, the likelihood of receiving an investigation of maltreatment decreased. Further, significant relationships were found between a family’s score on several individual items of the HFPI and the occurrence of a maltreatment investigation. This dissertation concludes with a discussion of potential avenues of research on the topic of risk assessment in prevention programs serving at-risk families.