Session: Using Early Childhood Parenting Interventions to Promote the Development of Children Reared in High-Risk Families (Society for Social Work and Research 29th Annual Conference)

Social workers are the largest group of professionals providing services to address the mental health and developmental needs of young children in the U.S. Furthermore, early childhood parenting interventions have been documented to improve parenting and child outcomes among families facing multiple risk factors. This symposium will include presentations by social work scholars from three different institutions summarizing evaluations of parenting interventions targeting parents experiencing distinct risks. Consistent with the conference theme, they examine parenting interventions conducted collaboratively within different human service settings. Paper 1 focuses on improving mental health and parenting outcomes in a group of pregnant and postpartum women with Opioid Use Disorder (OUD). This study assessed the effectiveness of a home-based attachment-focused intervention, BRIGHT, through a community-engaged pragmatic randomized clinical trial. BRIGHT participants exhibited better outcomes concerning maternal withdrawal, maternal intrusiveness, infant negative affect, and dyadic reciprocity. Both treatment and control groups showed improvements in maternal mental health, parenting stress, and parental reflective functioning over time. Findings suggested that the BRIGHT intervention has the potential to enhance parent-child interactions for postpartum women with OUD and their infants. Paper 2 summarizes the implementation of the Better Together program at a community organization serving families with children. The project's purpose was to understand the impact of increasing positive interactions to improve the parent-child relationship and decrease negative parenting interactions with children, in families experiencing Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs). The Better Together program increased nurturing and attachment, decreased parental hostility toward young children, and improved parents' perceptions of difficulties at home, school or work at posttest, 3 months later, and at 12-month follow-up. Implementing universal programs that support positive family experiences could be a strategy to increase well-being in families, potentially decreasing the likelihood of ACE occurrences. Finally, Paper 3 reports on an investigation of Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-up (ABC), an attachment-based preventive intervention, as a supplement to Early Head Start (EHS). The goal was to determine whether ABC positively impacted maternal and child language among Latine immigrant families from low-income backgrounds, and whether parenting behaviors mediated these effects. Children whose parents received ABC showed higher quality language than their counterparts whose parents did not, regarding total number of utterances, types, and tokens, mean length of utterances, and sum of Brown's morphemes in both languages. Parenting behaviors were not significant mediators of ABC outcomes. These findings suggest that parenting interventions designed to improve social-emotional outcomes can improve children's development in other domains, and that an intensive intervention integrated into EHS can help achieve this program's mandate to enhance children's development. Taken together, these papers underscore the benefits of parenting interventions for a range of families, including those who have substance use histories, report Adverse Childhood Experiences, and are immigrants experiencing poverty. The symposium discussant will address the benefits of utilizing parenting interventions as a prevention strategy to improve outcomes for families from high-risk backgrounds, will raise critical reflections on the papers, and encourage questions from the audience.4 modified by 129.2.193.185 on 4-15-2024-->