The goals of primary prevention focus either on enhancing psychological health and strengthening competencies, resources, and coping skills; or reducing the rates of occurrence of emotional disorders. One promising child abuse prevention approach focuses on enhancing parental competencies and skills that contribute to the development of positive parent-child relationships and prevent the onset of dysfunctional interactions. Programs using this approach usually incorporate parenting skills, child development information, and coping strategies to reduce stress in the parenting role. Such programs may involve general audiences or be aimed at at specific ethnic groups or other populations. Programs aimed at preventing the onset of abusive behavior typically involve media campaigns; information, crisis, and referral services; and efforts at the neighborhood and community levels to empower social networks and increase their ability to provide support and feedback to families. The third type of program targets high-risk groups such as the poor, single and teenage parents and the socially isolated. These may include programs to improve parent-child bonding, home visitors, and parent aides. The effectiveness of these approaches remains to be empirically demonstrated because of methodological problems, including lack of appropriate comparison groups, poor choice of outcome measures, and failure to measure proximal programmatic objective and distal prevention goals. 48 references.