Investigating Parenting Between Female CPS- and/or Court-Involved Partner Violence Survivors and Their Young Children

Background/Purpose: Intimate partner violence (IPV) survivors who are mothers can be mandated to services by child protection services (CPS) and/or the courts. Many states’ CPS policies consider IPV-exposure as maltreatment, and CPS-involved survivors are often referred to community services (Moles, 2008). Following arrests for defending themselves and/or their children from perpetrators, court-involved survivors also often become service-mandated (Muftić et al., 2007). Unfortunately, there is scant research about the needs of and services for this vulnerable group of survivors and their children.

Staff at community-based agencies in one southeastern U.S city found that they were serving increasing numbers of such survivors and their children. Consequently, the agencies partnered to develop and implement a parenting/safety program for CPS- and/or court-involved survivors. Participants meet weekly for 13 group sessions on IPV and parenting. Parenting is a critical program component because supportive parenting and positive child-parent relationships are protective for IPV-exposed children (Graham-Berman et al., 2009).

As part of our collaborative research with these agencies, we investigated survivors’ parenting using observational methods. To our knowledge, this is among the first efforts to investigate parenting using observational methods with CPS- and court-involved survivors. Thus, the primary aim of this exploratory study was to assess the acceptability/feasibility of parenting observations. We also explored survivors’ parenting practices (needs/strengths) with their young children (i.e., ≤ five years old) because of these children’s heightened maltreatment risk relative to older children.

Methods:We used the Keys to Interactive Parenting Scale (KIPS) to investigate survivors’ parenting and parent-child interactions with their young child during a 15-minute, video-recorded, structured play session. KIPS provides a total parenting quality score and information regarding 12 parenting facets. Multiple research raters were trained and certified to use KIPS. Mothers also completed demographic and standardized measures (e.g., Adult-Adolescent Parenting Inventory). Bivariate analyses were used to explore associations between observational parenting scores and mother-reported demographics, parenting, and child characteristics.

Results: Twenty-five women participated (49% response rate). High internal consistency (.93) and acceptable inter-rater reliability scores (.47) were achieved. Overall, KIPS indicated better than average parenting. Although mothers demonstrated positive parenting across all domains, scores were lowest for adapts strategies (M=3.51, SD=0.22) and promotes exploration/curiosity (M=3.69, SD=0.17), and highest for physical interaction (M=4.53, SD=0.16) and involvement in child’s activities (M=4.32, SD=0.17). Scores indicating positive parenting overall were positively associated with mothers’ education, number of children, children’s peer problems, children’s internalizing behaviors, and negatively associated with mothers’ illicit drug use.

Conclusion/Implications: Although there is room for improvement in participation rates, findings provide preliminary evidence to corroborate the positive parenting of CPS- and/or court-involved survivors identified by prior research using self-report measures. Research examining IPV survivors’ parenting has been critiqued because of the self-reported nature of parenting data. Accordingly, this study addresses important research gaps by using observational methods and provides preliminary evidence for the feasibility of using parenting observations with CPS- and/or court-involved survivors. We also present lessons learned from this exploratory research to inform future studies, including recommendations for increasing research participation while maintaining survivors’ confidentiality, safety and empowerment.