Emotion-Focused Intervention for Mothers and Children Reuniting After Prison This revised R34 application is in response to PAR-06-248 """"""""From Intervention Development to Services: Exploratory Research Grants."""""""" The substantial number of parents incarcerated in the criminal justice system has resulted in increased attention to the enormous challenges faced by their children, now numbering over two million. Risk factors associated with incarceration, including disruption of parent-child relationships, transitions in living arrangements, financial and other stressors on caregivers, and emotional distress put children of incarcerated parents at great risk for developing significant behavioral and emotional disorders. Though there is some evidence that the impact of parent criminality on child maladjustment is mediated by parenting practices, there are few programs to promote positive parenting or support the reunification of incarcerated parents and their children upon release from prison. Hence, we propose a three-year project to develop and pilot a multi-modal emotion-focused intervention program to foster both the emotional connection between incarcerated mothers and children and their individual emotional and behavioral adjustment. The emotion program will extend an existing evidence-informed prison-implemented parenting program by strengthening the emotional skills of mothers, children, and the children's caregivers to help the family cope with the negative emotions and experiences associated with the transition home from prison. As well, because emotion regulation difficulties are associated with a wide range of psychopathology, promoting children's emotional competence through emotion-related parenting practices will enable us to decrease risk for a wide- range of child and adolescent difficulties. In Year 1, the intervention will be developed and refined, and implementation measures will be developed. In Years 2 and 3, an experimental pilot study will be conducted with 60 mothers and their children ages 6-8 years (n=30 emotion-focused intervention; n=30 active parenting treatment comparison). Incarcerated mothers, their children, and their children's caregiver will be recruited to participate. The emotion program will involve learning skills to increase maternal and child emotion regulation as well as positive parent emotion socialization behaviors. Families in the intervention group will participate in intervention activities both before and after mothers' release from prison. Participants will be assessed prior to the beginning of the intervention, after the pre-release intervention, and after the post-release intervention. We hypothesize that increasing parents' ability to both regulate their own emotions and assist children with their regulation of emotions will increase the likelihood of healthy emotional and social adjustment for children in the reunification phase, and set the stage for positive child outcomes over time. For Emotion-Focused Intervention for Mothers and Children Reuniting After Prison Principal Investigator: Joann Wu Shortt, Ph.D. As the number of incarcerated parents continues to increase, the children of these parents face many challenges that emphasize the importance of good parenting. Children of incarcerated parents are more likely than their peers to experience emotional and behavior problems, and there are very few programs to support parents and children after prison. This project will help mothers, caregivers, and children adjust to life outside of prison by teaching them healthy emotional skills. ? ? ? ?
| Low, Sabina; Shortt, Joann Wu (2017) Family, Peer, and Pubertal Determinants of Dating Involvement Among Adolescents. J Res Adolesc 27:78-87 |
| Shortt, Joann Wu; Eddy, J Mark; Sheeber, Lisa et al. (2014) Project home: a pilot evaluation of an emotion-focused intervention for mothers reuniting with children after prison. Psychol Serv 11:1-9 |
| Shortt, Joann Wu; Stoolmiller, Mike; Smith-Shine, Jessica N et al. (2010) Maternal emotion coaching, adolescent anger regulation, and siblings' externalizing symptoms. J Child Psychol Psychiatry 51:799-808 |
