Child neglect is the most prevalent and least understood form of child maltreatment both in Australia (AIHW 2007) and the United States (USDHHS 2008). There is a general consensus that because child neglect is multidimensional, no one method will be effective in preventing it. Use of prevention science principles (Cole et al. 1993), which focus on enhancing protective factors and decreasing risk factors, should be used to target families and communities, but be applied in such a way as to individualise and recognise their differences. This paper uses the stages of prevention science to illustrate the development, implementation, and evaluation of a community based prevention program called Family Connections (DePanfilis & Dubowitz 2005; DePanfilis, Dubowitz & Kunz 2008). Implications of this process are considered in the context of recommendations of the World Health Organization for preventing child maltreatment (Butchart, Harvey, Mian & Furniss 2006).

Working with children and families experiencing child maltreatment requires that a practitioner understand the family: their risks, their needs, their strengths, and the goals of the intervention. Therefore, many of the tools and training topics that support this work focus on family and child assessment. The purposes of a thorough assessment are to understand the immediate circumstances so that children are protected, and interventions are relevant to the child and family's circumstances and events. This paper presents a new assessment tool that is ecologically oriented, empirically based, and able to provide a continuous assessment of the child and family that can chart improvements and declines over the life of a case.

The following review is by Angela Stephenson, an early childhood specialist working with diverse groups of parents in Adelaide. She uses The Benevolent Society's Play Power Parent Workshop with her parent groups who have babies and toddlers. She is finding that the workshop activities and resources are both accessible and flexible, and that they help the parents to use everyday moments to engage with their young children, to learn how they grow and develop, and to understand why simple, playful interactions throughout the day are necessary for healthy brain development.