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Mailman School
of Public Health
Columbia University
722 West 168th Street,
8th Floor
New York, NY 10032
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Strengthening America's families: Promising parenting strategies for delinquency prevention user's guide Karol L.Kumpfer The author reviews the research on how early childhood parenting practices and the family environment are connected to later delinquent behavior in youth, and describes the 25 most promising intervention programs found in a national search of model family strengthening programs. She describes socially deprived families' - those whose children and adult members are most vulnerable to ATOD use, low academic achievement, behavior problems, and chronic delinquency. Research shows that programs that aim to improve family functioning and strengthen protective factors (such as the ability to form a caring relationship with an adult, formulate long-range planning, or relate to the school and community), have greater impact than child or youth-only skills training. The author presents a matrix of program types by age of child and degree of family dysfunction (all families, at-risk families, or those in crisis), and distinguishes between approaches that concentrate on the parents (parenting approaches), and those that involve the parent with at least the target child (family approaches). Parenting approaches include: (1) parent education programs (limited to a few lectures and simple exercises); (2) behavioral parent training (using programmed instructional materials, many experiential exercises, and homework); (3) Adlerian parenting programs (using principles of clinical psychology, such as PET and STEP); (4) parent support groups (as exemplified in Toughlove, PRIDE, and Mothers of Pre-Schoolers (MOPS); (5) in-home parent education; and (6) parent participation in preschool settings (such as Head Start) or youth groups (such as City Lights). Family intervention approaches include family education programs (lectures or home workbooks); family skills training (behavioral training); family therapy (using specific therapeutic techniques that are structural, functional, strategic, or structural-strategic); family services models; in-home preservation; and surrogate family approaches (using extended family members or other adults instead of the parents, such as The Teaching Family Model (TFM). The author suggests several ways to improve current family strengthening programs: increase their intensity; match family needs and child developmental stages with program approaches and make them easily understood and culturally relevant; screen for disruptive parents; oversee careful recruitment and retention of families; overcome barriers to participation (such as transportation and child care); give other needed services; choose easy to use, low-cost program materials; and assess program impact in the short- and long-term. Many of the programs profiled specifically target families with preschool-aged children and are easy to replicate.
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Disclaimer Free To Grow is a national program supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation with direction and technical assistance provided by the Mailman School of Public Health of Columbia University. |