Parent Groups

These gatherings are held at the office sites and/or in collaboration with local parenting groups. Facilitated by Healthy StepsSM Specialists, the meetings offer mothers and fathers social support as well as interactive learning sessions and practice in problem solving. Parent groups can be focused on specific learning events such as an evening parenting seminar on infant massage or CPR. In addition, these gatherings can be more long-term parent or parent-child groups, which meet weekly or monthly for 4-6 sessions.

Click here to view or download the protocol for Parent Groups.


The Healthy Steps services were originally developed as program requirements for use in the national evaluation phase of the program. In order to ensure the integrity of the evaluation, all sites needed to implement Healthy Steps in virtually the same manner. Because evaluation concerns will not affect new practices beginning Healthy Steps operations, these practices will have considerable flexibility in shaping their Healthy Steps programs. New practices should therefore use these protocols as guidance in their decision making.