Child Welfare Outcome: Child/Family Well-Being
Type of Maltreatment: Exposure to Domestic Violence
Target Population: Children ages 6-12 and their mothers exposed to intimate partner violence in the last year. Children may also have been abused.
The Kids’ Club & Moms Empowerment are two programs designed to coincide with each other and are most effective when both the mother and child participate in the intervention. Kids Club is a preventive intervention program that targets children’s knowledge about family violence; their attitudes and beliefs about families and family violence; their emotional adjustment; and their social behavior in the small group. The program is phase-based, such that early sessions are designed to enhance the child’s sense of safety, to develop the therapeutic alliance, and to create a common vocabulary of emotions for making sense of violence experiences. Later sessions address responsibility for violence, managing emotions, family relationship paradigms, and conflict and its resolution. Activities rely on displacement and group lessons are reviewed and repeated, as needed, each week. Moms Empowerment is a parenting program that provides support to mothers by empowering them to discuss the impact of the violence on their child’s development; to build parenting competence; to provide a safe place to discuss parenting fears and worries; and to build connections for the mother in the context of a supportive group. In essence, this ten-session intervention is aimed at improving mothers’ repertoire of parenting and disciplinary skills, and enhancing social and emotional adjustment, thereby reducing the children’s behavioral and adjustment difficulties.