The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention is a component of the Office of Justice Programs, which also includes the Bureau of Justice Assistance, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the National Institute of Justice, and the Office for Victims of Crime.

Acknowledgments Stephen J. Bavolek, Ph.D., is the founder and President of Family Development Resources, Inc., and Executive Director of the Family Nurturing Center. He has conducted extensive research in the fields of parent education and child abuse and neglect prevention and has developed the Adult-Adolescent Parenting Inventory and the Nurturing Parenting Programs. All photographs in this Bulletin were provided by Dr. Bavolek.

From the Administrator Since laws requiring mandatory reporting of child abuse were enacted in the late 1960's and early 1970's, the number of reported cases has increased. According to the National Clearinghouse on Child Abuse and Neglect Information, State child protective services agencies reported that just over 900,000 children were identified as victims of substantiated or indicated abuse and neglect in 1998. More than four-fifths (87 percent) of all victims were maltreated by one or both parents, with neglect by a female parent with no other perpetrators identified as the most common maltreatment pattern (45 percent). Although many factors contribute to child abuse and neglect, many social scientists believe that the leading cause is the generational cycle of violence in which parents rear children within the context of the violence they experienced as children. In 1979, the National Institute of Mental Health funded a 2-year research project that resulted in the development of the Nurturing Parenting Programs, a family-centered parenting initiative designed to address this cycle of violence. This Bulletin describes how parenting patterns are learned and how the Nurturing Parenting Programs help to stop the generational cycle of abuse and neglect by building nurturing parenting skills. John J. Wilson Acting Administrator