Addressing Child Maltreatment Through Mutual Support and Self-Help Among Parents

Abstract

Parent-to-parent mutual support and self-help are core elements of any community system of family care. The challenge is to actualize capacity for all parents with due regard to culture, socioeconomic status, gender, place, and other critical factors. The sample programs reviewed here include crisis supports (e.g. helplines), peer-to-peer coaching, parent mutual support groups, support skills development, and neighborhood centers. In each, parent-to-parent relationships are reciprocal – everyone is seeking help and everyone gives help. But programs for self-help and mutual support are often regarded as supplemental to professional services. What if professional services were seen as supplemental to the family’s own efforts? This would require a social norms transformation throughout the social ecology – individual, family, neighborhood, organizational, and policy levels. To honor and support parental efforts as primary, not supplemental, could transform communities in ways that lead to safety, nurture, and stability for children.