Examining Change in Parenting, Mental Health and Early Child Development in Immigrant Families Participating in a Trauma-Focused Intervention

Background and Purpose: Immigrant parents raising young children often face challenges in their new countries including family separation, fear of deportation, limited social and concrete support, trauma symptomatology, and overall parenting stress (Yoshikawa & Kholoptseva, 2013). These pressures contribute to cumulative strains on parenting practices and ultimately impact the young child’s development. Although community social service agencies have begun to adapt and implement evidence-based trauma-focused interventions to address the needs of immigrant families, little is known about whether participation is associated with improvement in parenting and child development. This quasi-experimental study uses evaluation data to examine changes in parenting knowledge and stress, mental health and child social-emotional development with predominantly Latinx immigrant families participating in a home-based intervention for young children and their caregivers.

Methods: Baseline and discharge data collected at a community agency offering Child-Parent Psychotherapy to primarily immigrant Latinx families with young children were used for analysis (M sessions=19.2, SD=8.0). All variables were measured using standardized instruments in Spanish or English (Protective Factors Survey, [PFS, Knowledge of parenting], Parenting Stress Index [PSI], Brief Symptom Inventory [BSI], Posttraumatic Stress Checklist [PCL], and Devereux Early Childhood Assessment [DECA]). T-tests were computed on all variables of interest to assess change from baseline to discharge.

Results: The sample consisted of 33 caregivers (mean age=33.5 years, SD=6.4) and their young children (mean age=37.4 months, SD=21.0); 88% were Latinx immigrants, mostly from Central America (62%). Approximately half were never married, and half had less than a high school degree. The majority had household incomes less than $24,999 (60.7%). At baseline, caregivers reported a mean of 10 lifetime traumatic events for themselves and 3 traumatic events for their young children. 55% of caregivers scored as at risk or high parenting stress (PSI); overall mean mental health score was 0.78 on the BSI; 30.3% of caregivers were at-risk for PTSD. Preliminary results showed significant change from baseline to discharge in parenting knowledge (PFS, t=2.54, p=.02*), aspects of mental health (BSI, obsessive compulsive subscale, t= -2.16, p= .04*), trauma symptoms (PCL, t=-3.16, p=.003**) and child social-emotional development (t=2.16, p=.04*). Change was noted at the trend level in parenting stress (PSI, Difficult Child- t= -1.72, p= .095^t) and protective factors (PFS, Concrete Support- t=1.88, p=0.07^t). Effect sizes for change were small to medium (.30-.55).

Conclusions: Preliminary results underscore the feasibility of implementing a trauma-focused intervention for primarily Latinx immigrant families with young children in a community social work setting. Moreover, results suggest that caregiver mental health, trauma symptoms and child social-emotional development may improve over the course of the intervention. Given the small N and quasi-experimental design results should be interpreted with caution. However, they are promising and point to the need for further research with a larger N and an experimental design to further test implementation of the intervention and to clarify the mechanisms whereby change in parenting, caregiver mental health and child social-emotional development occur. The results are particularly important given increased fear and isolation in immigrant communities due to the current COVID pandemic.