Investing in futures: a critical view of options for early intervention and prevention in indigenous communities.
Abstract
Current thinking about intervention increasingly accepts the premise that early childhood experience crucially determines health and wellbeing and the attainment of competences at later ages, and that investment in the early years will be reflected in improved education, employment, and even national productivity. While this logic in itself appears unassailable, and is for many outcomes backed by strong research evidence, decisions about just what deserves public investment are complex. For indigenous societies, sources of early risk are situated in family contexts whose potentials for resilience are often not well understood and where languages for intervention have not been created. This paper outlines aspects of an early intervention project in progress on the Tiwi Islands to highlight themes in indigenous parenting and to examine the prospects for developing culturally competent interventions which can help alleviate some sources of early childhood risk. It illustrates the families and the problems they face and considers how intervention can be approached through engagement of community members within strategies for development of new services. The paper will examine three main themes: o General propositions concerning the need for investment in early intervention research o Outline of an intervention currently under way on the Tiwi Islands o Aspects of Tiwi family life.