Children's Matters: Protective Factors for Families

By Josh Chittum, Children's Program Director

Our Manager of Mental Health Services has written recently about the village effect here at Community LINC. Out of all the various members of the village, it is the family unit, small micro-villages themselves that I’d like to focus upon for this week’s blog. As Community LINC’s Children’s Program Coordinator I frequently witness the intimate ways in which families function. I see how families struggle as well as how families rely on their strengths. I also notice the impact that family health has on children and youth and their development.

To better understand the role family dynamics has on children, I traveled to Jefferson City in April for a fantastic conference organized by the Missouri Children’s Trust Fund. During the conference I attended two training sessions on a curriculum developed by the University of Missouri Extension in collaboration with the Children’s Trust Fund, Project Launch, and Missouri Department of Mental Health.

The curriculum is titled “Strong Parents, Stable Children: Building Protective Factors to Strengthen Families” and focuses on strength-based assumptions about families. From there it explores five factors that help children and youth stay safe and thrive. The five factors are: concrete need in time of support, parent resilience, parenting knowledge, social connections, and social/emotional skills of children.

I loved the strength-based approach of the curriculum and the fact that it is not designed for one specific population. The ideas presented are ideas all parents can use whether they are experiencing homelessness or not. Whether parents live in an economically depressed zip code or not does not matter. The professor who developed the curriculum uses the five concepts in his family and I know that when my wife and I start a family we will pull from these concepts as well.

When I returned from the conference I approached my supervisor and the Manager of Mental Health Services about collaborating and presenting the protective factors curriculum to parents at Community LINC. Last month we held our first session with about eight mothers and it went phenomenally well.

I shiver when I hear one-dimensional descriptions of those experiencing homelessness. The negative adjectives used to paint a picture of those that would arrive at a place like Community LINC were not on display the night of the presentation.  The mothers fortified the community village that Manager of Mental Health Services Griselda Williams speaks about. They gave each other insights, tips, and strategies, and encouraged one another when issues with their children seemed overwhelming. They took down notes when they learned something new. They were not passive recipients of information designed for those that have “failed” in life. They, along with me, were active learners engaging with the curriculum. And all of us sought to improve the lives of children staying at Community LINC.  

The implementation of this curriculum is evidence that we are not paying lip service to being a client-centered and strengths-based organization. We carry out this philosophy in the daily decisions we make.