Parenting Support for Justice Involved Families

Research Plan: The incarceration of a parent is associated with a higher likelihood of children living in poverty, increased likelihood of needing mental health services and involvement in child protective service, increases in teen crime, and significant decreases in educational attainment and adult employment. Incarceration disproportionately affects families of color and those living in poverty, and impacts children's long-term ability to emerge from poverty in adulthood, increasing the rate of intergenerational transmission of adversity and incarceration. Thus, it is critical to support families experiencing the incarceration of a parent. It is equally important to provide parents returning home from prison with programs that equip them with parenting strategies and techniques to buffer the potentially adverse outcomes of parental incarceration on their children's socioemotional development. It may be the case that parenting programs post release may in fact serve to reduce recidivism.

The proposed project arises out of a request from KCCPTS, stemming from their recognition of the parenting needs of their clients and the desire to break the cycle of intergenerational transmission of adversity and incarceration. Parents returning to their families after incarceration have unique experiences and needs as they work to strengthen their relationships with their children. In addition to potential challenges connecting with and parenting their children, they often experience mental health issues related to their adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and incarceration. This may contribute to the intergenerational transmission of adversity and incarceration. While parenting interventions exist, they do not specifically address the unique needs of formerly incarcerated parents. Additionally, they are expensive or hard to access, and do not explicitly address the mental and emotional well-being of the parent to support more effective parenting. Caregivers for the children while the parent was incarcerated, usually the other parent or a grandparent, also experience adversity and challenges with parenting, and may benefit from support as they surrender the parenting role or co-parent with the formerly incarcerated parent. The proposed project would equip staff with tools to more effectively support the well-being of parents, children and caregivers through a task-sharing approach.

A task-sharing model for prevention is a promising approach to addressing the need for interventions in low-resource settings with a limited workforce to meet the need. In task-sharing, staff currently working with community organizations serving children and families are trained to deliver prevention programs. These staff often have developed trusting relationships with the families they serve, and thus interventions can be incorporated into regular services at little additional cost to the organization. Finally, after staff are trained, the tools and resources remain with the community. Such an approach holds tremendous promise for making preventive parenting interventions more accessible in communities that often do not have access to evidence-based interventions due to resource, language, or time barriers. Research evaluating such approaches provides knowledge about innovative ways to improve mental health in low-resource communities, and a task-sharing approach, if shown to be effective, offers a generalizable and scalable approach to improving community mental health over time.

Project Aims: The investigators aim to evaluate a task-sharing approach to offering formerly incarcerated parents and their families a parenting support intervention. That is, re-entry navigators will be trained to deliver evidence-based behavioral parenting intervention(s) that promote children's social-emotional and behavioral well-being. This will include cognitive-behavioral and mindfulness practices for supporting parent well-being. The task-sharing approach increases the feasibility and accessibility of the program, particularly because facilitators have shared experiences and trusted connections with their clients. This project proposes four main activities: 1) conduct focus groups with parents re-entering the community to better understand their parenting needs and challenges, 2) work with KCCPTS re-entry navigators to incorporate information from their experience and the focus group to adapt an existing parenting intervention, 3) train re-entry navigators to deliver the program, and 4) conduct a preliminary evaluation of the impact of the program on parents' well-being and parenting when the program is delivered by KCCPTS re-entry navigators.

Research Plan: Preliminary studies. The Center for Child and Family Well-being (CCFW) has convened a multidisciplinary group of collaborators to conduct research on supporting families experiencing the incarceration of a parent. The goal is to evaluate approaches to supporting the whole family experiencing a parent's incarceration. Collectively, the researchers have developed and implemented interventions for parents who are currently or formerly incarcerated (Charles, Pace) as well as a parenting program for parents living in poverty or who are experiencing homelessness (Lengua). The proposed study would add to this body of evidence that a task-sharing approach can address accessibility and feasibility of prevention programs.