There are some programs that serve women, such as chemical dependency treatment programs, maternal-child health agencies (such as WIC), or child welfare systems, that have been mobilized to screen and identify women at risk and provide brief intervention for FASD prevention. Much more remains to be done in this mobilization effort. Brief intervention for FASD prevention has been found to be quite effective, at least for some segments of the drinking population (e.g., Chang et al., 2005). But FASD prevention is not the focus of this article. Of interest here is that these screening systems can not only lead to prevention, but also potentially identify children with FASD who need diagnosis and intervention.
There are also programs that identify and provide long-term services to high-risk women with serious chemical dependency problems, including drinking, who are at risk for having (or already have) children born with FASD. These women need intensive support and mentoring, and their children need intensive services. One such program is the Parent-Child Assistance Program that now has multiple locations in the U.S. and Canada (Grant et al., 2005). Other programs have offered comprehensive services for women and their children, including chemical dependency treatment and family support services (e.g., Nair et al., 2003; Schuler et al., 2003). Such programs have received significant research and public health effort over the past decade, and have so far shown mixed findings. Interestingly, there are new ideas for modifying and improving these services for families with information from the fields of infant mental health and child maltreatment (e.g., Ondersma, 2006).
Why are screening systems for women at risk, and their subsequent treatment programs, of interest to FASD intervention? In part, because these programs offer important chances to identify parents who may have FASD— and vital opportunities for very early identification (and treatment) of children born alcohol-exposed. In fact, FASD has been called a “transgenerational” problem (Streissguth & O’Malley, 2000), because it can occur across several generations in one family. Screening systems for women who drink during pregnancy are even one way to find instances in which there are problems across the generations from mother to child.