Creating and Implementing an Evidence Informed Intervention to Enhance the Quality of Supervised Parent/Child Visits

Background and Purpose: Early negative experiences with visits can lead to inconsistent visit attendance and stress and trauma for both parents and children. For child welfare system (CWS)-involved parents, visits may be the only context to actively parent their children and represents an opportunity to provide services to reduce stress, address trauma, and support positive parent child interactions which may have long term benefits for children and parents. Evidence based programs (EBPs) have been strongly promoted within child welfare systems (CWS), yet the evidence used to support these programs has typically been gathered in other fields, their effectiveness with CWS-involved families is uncertain, the cost of these programs is limiting and, their integration into CWS is an important challenge. The Strive Visitation Program, developed in a partnership between a public university and the local state CWS, has been designed to address these challenges and integrated into the delivery of supervised visitation services. The goal of Strive is to provide education and support to parents early in their visiting experience to enhance their attendance in visits and improve the quality of parent-child visits. Feasibility and usability data from a pretest of Strive as well as outcome data from the current pilot study with 25 Strive and 25 comparison group parents will be presented.

Methods: A pretest of 15 Strive sessions was conducted with six eligible families referred by a CWS office to the Strive service provider from June-December, 2015. Qualitative and quantitative methods were used to collect data via weekly interviews with parents (n=7) and weekly surveys and check in calls and a final focus group with Strive Visit Navigators (VN) and supervisor (n=3 to capture feedback on each session and recommendations for program refinement.

Results: Seven parents and seven children comprised the six families that participated in Strive.  Parents were 57% female, 43% male, 57% white, 14% African American, and 29% Latino. Three parents reported homelessness. Parents’ mean age was 29 and children’s was 3.5. Seventy Strive sessions and 69 interviews were completed for a participation rate of 98.6%. Parents’ on time attendance was 99% for visits and 86% for Strive sessions. Parents found the sessions helpful and rated them 4.8 out of five. Parent ratings remained consistently high throughout the 15 sessions. The trusted relationship that emerged between the parent and the VN was of critical importance to the parents. Two VNs delivered the program, both female, one African American, the other white. VNs found the sessions to be valuable and reported they reduced parents’ fear and anger and helped parents to focus on visits with their children.

Conclusions and Implications: Feedback on curricular gaps and strengths from parents and VNs along with partner and stakeholder input led to curricular revisions and a focus on the first five sessions of Strive for the current pilot. Parent engagement in visits, skill development and implementation concerns are under study. If found to be effective in improving parent child visits, Strive may represent a unique and much needed contribution to CWS practice.