Joyli Kamau, “A Public Health Approach to Preventing Child Maltreatment and Building Resilient Communities”
Mentor: Paul Florsheim, Public Health, Public Health (Joseph J. Zilber School of)
Poster #16
Just prior to the COVID pandemic, the Families First Prevention Services Act was passed by Congress with the goal of keeping children out of the child welfare system by providing parents at risk for child maltreatment with parenting support. One of challenges in meeting this goal is that parents who experience the greatest stress and who have the fewest resources are often the least likely to receive needed support; a trend made worse by the pandemic. This presentation focuses on a community outreach effort to increase access to the Positive Parenting Program or “Triple P,” a public health, evidence-based approach to addressing family violence by equipping parents with tools to manage stress, improve communication, and build nurturing home environments. Beginning at the height of the pandemic, we reached out to over 500 at-risk families in Milwaukee’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods, recruited over 300 parents into Triple P parent coaching programs which, for the sake of safety and convenience, were delivered to families one at a time, primarily on-line. Standardized pre and post assessments, collected from over 200 parents, indicated that families who completed their coaching sessions reported statistically significant increases in positive family functioning and significant reductions in dysfunctional parenting. These findings illustrate the potential of community-based outreach and evidence-based programming for preventing family violence in disadvantaged communities.