Psychoeducational Intervention In Preventing Child Abuse

Child maltreatment can occur because any number of reasons, from parental dysfunction to abusive discipline patterns. There are hundreds of programs that exist to prevent child maltreatment but there are few that are supported by research. Using the whole family to evaluate current methods of discipline and daily function can greatly help reduce further maltreatment and all together prevent it from repeating. Nurturing Parenting Programs (NPP) aim to prevent and treat child abuse and neglect by using psychoeducational and cognitive-behavioral approaches to teach parents how to “re-parent.” Its programs help parents learn new patterns of parenting to replace their old abusive ones (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration National
Skilled interventions are needed to help address these issues and help parents be healthy and nurturing role models for their children. NPP sets the foundation for research based programs for the prevention and overall reduce of child maltreatment by parents. Many programs have been created using NPP’s framework of family involvement to learn new parenting skills. The programs involve the entire family because research repeatedly supports family based interventions in comparison to individual interventions when attempting to rebuild and strengthen healthy family interactions, which in this case includes parenting (Bavolek & Rogers, 2012). The philosophy behind NPP is to help individual parents become confident and nurturing. As I’ve stated before, it uses psycho-educational and cognitive-behavioral approaches to learning. Broken down this means it considers the impact of past events on current behavior to become aware of and understand new knowledge, skills and strategies of parenting to replace old patterns of thinking and behaving with new thought patterns and behaviors (Bavolek, 2014). It’s a therapeutic approach that uses “lessons, activities, information and role plays designed to stimulate
It also aimed to prevent short-term accusations and verify longer-term incidences of maltreatment for a child welfare population (Maher, Corwin, & Hodnett, 2011). This article’s results were based on discoveries made two years after the programs implementation. They showed that after two years, caregivers had made enough changes in their parenting behaviors because to the program and were less likely to engage in abusive or neglectful behaviors that would result in agency validation (Maher, Corwin, & Hodnett, 2011). While the results didn’t see “significant association with overall reports of maltreatment in the two-year time frame,” they did confirm that participants who attended more sessions were just as likely to be reported but were less likely to be validated for child maltreatment (Maher, Corwin, & Hodnett,