STRONG ROOTS
Mom Power
A Group-Based Intervention Program for Mothers
Mom Power is a 10-week, 13-session evidence-based, theory driven intervention that uses an innovative and proven curriculum specifically designed to target trauma-induced barriers to healthy relationships, social support, and engagement with resources and services. While manualized, Mom Power is highly individualized and interactive and provides a nurturing environment for mothers as they reflect on their lived experiences and grow the skills and tools needed to promote both their own and their children’s health and well-being.
A unique aspect of Mom Power is the Child Team which provides each child with one-on-one care focusing on meeting the child’s social-emotional needs and providing attachment-related experiences within a developmental framework. The Child Team aims to create a physically and emotionally safe environment for the children, so moms feel confident in the care their children are receiving and can focus on the learning provided in the Mom’s Group.
How Does Mom Power Help?
Mom Power provides parents with mental health and parenting psychoeducation, engages them in emotional and physical self-care to reduce their symptoms of depression and anxiety, elicits their reflective curiosity, and nurtures their reflective capacity. Mom Power embraces evidence-based theory and practice and is the only program, to date, that has documented brain changes in participants “empathy circuits.”
The long-term objectives of Mom Power are to help build (or strengthen) enhanced protective factors for families with young children to ensure they have the resources they need to reach their full potential. This includes an increased knowledge of parenting and child development, strengthened child social-emotional competence, increased social connections, improved access to concrete support in times of need, and strengthened parent and family resilience.
FIVE PILLARS
What is Mom Power?
Parenting a young child, while often one of life’s most meaningful and joyful experiences, can also be one of the most challenging. Mom Power is a strengths-based program that engages mothers of young children facing adversity and stress in a nurturing environment that applies attachment theory, cognitive behavioral, and dialectical behavioral strategies to facilitate growth and new skills. A strength of the intervention lies in its multigenerational approach that facilitates each mothers’ insights and reflections and promotes her emotional health and the development of skills that enhance child health and well-being.
Mom Power pillars include:
Social Supports
Social support is enhanced by creating shared group experience, with opportunities for information relationship building during shared mealtime as well as by inviting mothers to bring a guest.
Attachment-Based Parenting Skills
The Parenting Education curriculum emphasizes responsiveness and sensitivity to young children’s experiences. Participants learn key concepts in parenting and child development, observe video interactions and apply concepts learned, engage in activities designed to develop and practice skills and reflect on interaction with their own children.
CBT and DBT-based self-care skills, stress reduction, and mindfulness
Self-Care/Stress-Reduction addresses the mothers’ needs for hands-on strategies for reducing their own levels of stress and to help support optimal mental health in order to provide balanced parenting and support their children’s needs.
Parent-Child Interactions
Parent-Child Interactions are supported by a curriculum that emphasizes creating safe, predictable routines. Mothers receive in vivo coaching on separating and reuniting with children. Mothers are encouraged to “try something new” and anticipate, observe and reflect upon these experiences.
Connections to ongoing care and community resources
Connecting Families to Care provides a safe and warm transfer of services including individualized referrals to relevant additional community resources.
A unique aspect of Mom Power is the Child Team which provides each child with one-on-one care focusing on meeting the child’s social-emotional needs and providing attachment-related experiences within a developmental framework. The Child Team creates a physically and emotionally safe environment for the children so moms feel confident in the care their children are receiving and are able to focus on the learning provided in the Mom’s Group. The children, too, benefit enormously from the special relationship they develop with their Child Team member.
THE CONTEXT
- More than 1 in 4 women experience pregnancy or postpartum mood or anxiety disorders, yet only 1/4 receive adequate treatment
- 54% of young mothers report feeling socially isolated or "friendless"
- A quarter of families with young children live with significant economic adversity
- Experiences of discrimination, structural racism, and implicit bias are associated with rising infant and maternal mortality
- Trauma and other stressful life events affect more than half of all parents and young children
Mom Power Fast Facts:
- Integrated mental health and parenting intervention
- Experiential, empowering, trauma-informed and strengths-based group that provides real-time parenting coaching
- Developed with input from mothers and community partners
- Strengthens protective factors to promote family resilience
- Reflective practice model that incorporates reflective supervision and attention to the experiences of providers and agencies
- Offered in multiple formats, including a multifamily group designed to provide a safe, trusting, and nurturing environment for families to connect, grow, and learn news skills
- Includes an innovative and proven curriculum to promote maternal mental health, positive parenting, and strong early relationships
Mom Power Works
Mom Power participants share their experiences with the program.
Mom Power is most effective for mothers experiencing high levels of stress or histories of trauma and adversity.
- Mothers show reductions in depression, PTSD symptoms, and parenting stress.
- Mothers report decreased social isolation.
- Mothers have improved confidence and comfort in parenting.
- Mothers increase understanding of children's behaviors and motivations.
- Two thirds of Mom Power graduates are connected with ongoing care within the community.
- Mothers report increased capacity to reflect on and respond to their own and their children's emotions.
- Brain imaging studies show that mothers who participate in Mom Power demonstrate greater activation of "empathy circuits" when observing their children's emotions. Mom Power is the first program of its kind to document functional changes in the maternal brain.
Treatment Increased Precuneus Response during Own Baby-Cry vs. Generic Baby Cry
Mom Power has been designated by the American Psychological Association (Division 12) as an evidence-based psychological treatment.