Age of Child: 1

The Be Strong Families’ (BSF) Parent Café Program is designed to provide a space for parents and caregivers to engage in facilitated, peer-driven discussions that foster self-reflection and strengthen protective factors for families. The program is built around the Strengthening Families Protective/Promotive Factors Framework and focuses on building connections between parents, promoting resilience, and developing strategies for addressing the challenges parents face. The Parent Café model is flexible and can be implemented in various settings, including schools, community organizations, and child welfare systems. Facilitators lead discussions, offer resources, and guide parents through topics that enhance parenting skills, create safer home environments, and support positive child outcomes.

F4C is an individual clinical intervention for fathers who have used violence with their partners and/or children and may have co-occurring substance misuse. F4C addresses 9 individually focused core topics, 4 co-parent communication topics, and 5 father-child focused topics in 60-minute individual therapy sessions over 18-24 weeks. In the context of a strong working alliance developed through focus on fatherhood, F4C employs a continual emphasis on reflective functioning and emotion regulation skills. Improvement in these targets in turn leads to reduced IPV and child maltreatment. F4C motivates the father to change by continually recognizing his desire to be a better parent and facilitating his ability to reflect on the experiences of his co-parent and children and learn skills to manage his emotions to improve outcomes for his family. It offers optional coparent and child participation in some sessions of the intervention when deemed appropriate and safe by the treating therapist.

NTDC, the comprehensive no-cost curriculum, is designed to tackle separation, loss, grief, and trauma in adoption and foster care. This cutting-edge resource offers adoptive, kinship, and foster parents flexible education that aims to empower them over the course of time and at the right time. Training is provided both as a synchronous classroom-based learning experience and through asynchronous “Right-Time” online modules that are available at any time for NTDC participants to build further knowledge, skills, and self-efficacy. While this training originated from key concepts to support children with intense service needs, it is designed to be used in any out-of-home placement, including with kin or adoptive caregivers.

Note: NTDC has also adapted to address the unique needs of indigenous communities; however, this separate manualized version is not part of this program review.

The Developmental Trauma and Attachment Program (DTAP) provides a comprehensive approach for children facing the lasting effects of trauma and attachment disruption. Through a fully integrated model combining attachment-focused therapy with trauma-informed practices, DTAP is designed to address foundational needs for trust, emotional regulation, and resilience.

DTAP also prioritizes caregiver involvement, creating a context for healing that is designed to strengthen the family system and foster lasting change.

BrightLife Kids — a CalHOPE program by Brightline — supports the behavioral health of every family living in California with kids ages 0–12 at no cost. No insurance or referrals are required to access this resource.

BrightLife Kids offers:

• Personalized coaching via video sessions and secure chats
• On-demand articles and videos
• Easy access to support with bilingual (English/Spanish) coaches and live translation in 17 additional languages
• Coach Specialists that connect families who have additional needs to the right resources in their community
• Peer communities & group coaching

BrightLife Kids coaches have diverse backgrounds as well as training and experience with LGBTQ+, BIPOC, and gender-diverse populations. They help families focus on skill-building for everyday challenges by tackling anxiety, stress, sleep, disorganization, and more.

Feel free contact the program for more information (see bottom of the page).

Dads Matter^HV (HV = Home Visitation) is a father inclusion enhancement designed to strengthen evidence-informed early home visitation services in ways that fully consider and include fathers’ roles, aiming to augment the preventive impact of home visitation on physical child abuse and neglect risk from either/both parents. The intervention is manualized and modular in nature, and designed to be flexibly delivered in conjunction with a standard home visiting program within the first 4 to 6 months of services. The intervention can be delivered flexibly in a variety of ways: during individual home visits with fathers and mothers, separately or conjointly, with service delivery occurring virtually, over the telephone, or in person. The intervention modules enhance and do not supplant standard home visiting services, guiding home visitors to assess fathers’ roles, engage, and intervene with biological fathers, working to reduce barriers to father engagement and build positive home visitor-father working relationships, improve the quality of father-mother co-parenting relationship, and directly support fathers in their roles as parents of young children.

Nurturing Skills™ for Families (NSF) is a model of the Nurturing Parenting® Programs designed to prevent child abuse and neglect by addressing key areas that contribute to a safe and healthy family environment. The program aims to promote positive family practices, enhance parental knowledge and skills, improve communication and problem-solving abilities, build emotional resilience, strengthen family bonds, address risk factors, foster community support, and encourage accountability.

This flexible program is tailored to meet the needs of families with children ranging from prenatal to 19 years old. The Lesson Guide for Parents contains over 80 individual lessons presented across 16 competency areas, with core competency lessons forming the program's basic structure. Additional lessons allow parent educators to customize the program to suit the specific needs of each group or family.

Although the program representatives state that the model can be used with all families, it is only rated in the Interventions for Abusive Behaviors on research with families involved in the child welfare system.

The goal of Group Attachment Based Intervention (GABI) is to meet the needs of parents with very young children who expressed the desire to be a different kind of parent than the parent who raised them. GABI was developed to meet that need by bringing together groups of parents who are socially isolated and affected by disparities across multiple systems of care. GABI is designed to help parents manage stress, increase their social support network, foster secure attachment, and improve parent-child relationships. GABI was developed for parents who have experienced significant trauma, who have mental health challenges, and/or experienced removal of a child.

Indiana Family Preservation Services (INFPS) are services designed to work with families who have had a substantiated incident of abuse and/or neglect, where the department of child services/child welfare services believes the child(ren) can remain in the home with their caregiver(s) with the introduction of appropriate services to the family. These services may also be utilized in the absence of a substantiated abuse or neglect allegation if there is an active in-home case. This service shall be for the entire family.

Minnesota Parent Mentor Program (MPMP) provides support for parents involved in the Child Protection System by helping them navigate their way through what can be an overwhelming and challenging process. A Parent Mentor will work with parents for the duration of their cases with child welfare and child protection--which can range from six months to more than a year--and help them remain connected with services afterward. Due to their firsthand experience, Parent Mentors can walk parents through every step to reunification or the best possible outcome for their family. As parents pursue reunification with their children, the program’s goal is to assist them in learning and applying effective parenting skills to maintain their reunification. By having parent mentors from the same geographic and cultural area as the parents, the MPMP is designed to be intentional about increasing racial equity in the child welfare system in addition to improving the quality of life for the families they serve.