STRONG ROOTS
Parenting
A Group-Based Intervention Program for Parents and Caregivers
What is Strong Roots Parenting?
Parenting a young child, while often one of life’s most meaningful and joyful experiences, can also be one of the most challenging. Strong Roots Parenting, an adaptation of Mom Power, is a strengths-based program that engages parents and caregivers 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 parents insights and reflections and promotes their emotional health and the development of skills that enhance child health and well-being.
Strong Roots Parenting 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 parents and caregivers 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 parents’ 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. Parents/caregivers receive in vivo coaching on separating and reuniting with children. They 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.
Strong Roots Parenting pillars include:
A unique aspect of Strong Roots Parenting 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 group. The children, too, benefit enormously from the special relationship they develop with their Child Team member.
THE CONTEXT
- Parents often lack support to give children the best start in life.
- Toxic stress, loneliness and isolation are at record high rates.
- Trauma symptoms such as reactions, patterns, and emotional and psychological effects can be passed on to children.
- There is a lack of access to mental health services.
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
Strong Roots groups are most effective for those experiencing high levels of stress or histories of trauma and adversity.
- Reduction in depression, PTSD symptoms, and parenting stress.
- Decreased social isolation.
- Improved confidence and comfort in parenting.
- Increased understanding of children's behaviors and motivations.
- Increased capacity to reflect on and respond to their own and their children's emotions.
- Brain imaging studies show that those who participate 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.