Homeless Mothers and Their Young Children

Purpose: Women with young children are the fastest growing segment of the homeless population. Family homelessness has been called a “double crisis”, because of its impact on both the mother and her child (Tischler, 2008). Despite the size of this social problem, very little research has been done on homeless families and how homelessness impacts on the mother's ability to parent and the child's subsequent emotional and physical health. In recognition of the significance of the impact that homelessness has on disrupting child-caregiver attachment attention has been given to the development of programs to preserve child-caregivers attachment while families are experiencing homelessness. Covenant House, the nation's largest provider of human services to homeless youth recognizes the need to address disruption that homelessness can have on the child-caregiver attachment by incorporating services to mothers. The extent to which the agency's assessments provide information that will give guidance to their efforts to address child-caregiver attachment and monitor the effectiveness of those efforts is the focus of this study. This study examines the potential for the Working Model of the Child Interview (WMCI; Zeanah, Benoit and Barton, 1993) to provide information that could be used to inform service interventions for at-risk women with young children.

Methods: This longitudinal research project focused on a small sample (14) of women with young children who self-selected to be in a one-year residential self-sufficiency program at Covenant House, NY. Each woman who entered the residence beginning in July, 2009 was invited into the study. Inclusion data included being over 18, ability to read English, signing an informed consent regarding data collection for self and child, and willingness to be interviewed every three months over a one-year period. A content analysis of the comprehensive basic assessment used by the agency was compared to the data derived from the WMCI administrated to the mothers. The semi-structured WMCI interviews were coded using the five-point scale, the WMCI-D scale (Crawford & Benoit, 2009).

Results: The assessment data collected at intake provided information on the participants' trauma, substance abuse, health history and social networks. Twenty-one percent of the women experienced at least one incident of sexual abuse, 50% experienced maternal abandonment and 85% experienced domestic violence. While this descriptive background information indicated potential vulnerabilities of the women, none of the information offered direction for interventions to support the child-caregiver attachment. In contrast, the WMCI-D provided nuanced information about the caregiver's representation of the child which could be used to structure interventions to address the ruptures in the parent/child attachment. The majority of the mothers' discourses expressed in the WMCI-D interview were classified as “disrupted” and indicated affective communication errors, intrusiveness/negativity and fearfulness/disorientation.

Implications: This study demonstrates how the WMCI-D can provide data to inform focused interventions to address the quality of the caregiver/child relationship. Because of the importance of reducing the risk of insecure attachments, two-generational programs could benefit from including the WMCI-D instrument to guide parenting interventions.