Adaptations

Parenting across the deployment cycle raises special challenges for military families with young children. The Strong Military Families (SMF) Program aims to improve the resilience and wellbeing of military and veteran families through the delivery of a positive parenting program. The SMF Program includes military service members, their spouses or partners, their young children from birth to 8-years-old, and older siblings. The program is unique in that the whole family participates. 

The SMF program incorporates a parent group curriculum and a corresponding child group curriculum, and is designed to address five core pillars: 1) increasing social support, 2) broadening positive parenting strategies, 3) enhancing parent-child connections, 4) learning stress reduction and self-care, and 5) connecting families to resources. 

Program Highlights

• Delivered in 10 weekly sessions or in a 2-day “weekend retreat” format
• Families in regions not currently served by the multifamily groups have the option of participating in a home-based version of the program, receiving regular weekly mailings conveying the SMF curriculum content. 
• Community-based agencies have been trained in implementation of the program.
• Program evaluation results indicate that parents who participate in the SMF groups feel more confident, are more effective in parenting, report a reduction in mental health symptoms, and describe improved child behavior.  

The Strong Beginnings curriculum uses Strong Roots concepts to support parents, caregivers, and child welfare and court team professionals, and focuses on nurturing and supporting early foundational relationships that are at the core of young children’s healing and resilience. Our group-based approach offers parents connection with other caregivers facing similar challenges, and helps parents feel less alone.  When parents and caregivers have access to information and strategies for effective parenting and co-parenting, they feel more supported are better able to respond effectively, and with empathy, to the child and to other important people in the child’s life. Reduced parenting stress is critical for retention – both for foster families/kin and for professional staff.  

This support and training for all parents and caregivers in the child’s life can strengthen the relationships that are essential to young children’s ability to adapt and cope, which can decrease behavioral concerns for children and positively impact placement stability. Early relationships are foundational for all children and families, and the Strong Beginnings model supports all the critical relationships that can help young children involved in the child welfare system not just grow, but to thrive. 

Hearts and Minds on Babies offers professional development training for teachers, and is currently being delivered and evaluated in Early Head Start classrooms at sites across Michigan. 

Our program is designed to support teachers as well as the teacher-child and teacher-parent relationship. To accomplish this, Hearts and Minds on Babies delivers an attachment-based curriculum that supports teachers in nurturing young children’s development, while also building social support and effective strategies for stress management for parents and teachers, as well as a useful framework for responding to common caregiving challenges. The program is currently undergoing a federally-funded collaborative multisite evaluation led by faculty from Wayne State University (Ann Stacks, PhD), Michigan State University (Claire Vallotton, PhD, and Holly Brophy-Herb, PhD) and the University of Michigan Zero to Thrive program (Maria Muzik, MD and Kate Rosenblum PhD). Results of our initial evaluation suggest that the professional development training strengthens teachers’ understanding of children’s emotional experiences, increases sensitive responding, and creates a common language for parents and teachers to communicate about young children’s experiences. 

Program Highlights

• It is not a “lecture” format, but hands-on, activity-based, engaging learning
• We attend to parallel process and promote positive interactions between teachers and co-facilitators, teachers and parents, and teachers, parents, and children
• We offer and talk about practical ways of understanding and helping children with difficult feelings and behaviors
• We introduce new concepts through video, activity, and discussion, and think together about how to apply these concepts in the classroom
• Knowing that teaching is a demanding job, we attend to teacher self-care and introduce and practice strategies for reducing stress and taking care of ourselves