Success Story - Family Support Program

The L. FAMILY

Ms. L. was referred to our agency by DSS and her probation officer for parenting services due to the multitude of long-term maladaptive behaviors that negatively influenced her parenting such as drug use, homelessness, repetitive incarcerations, and multiple hospitalizations for substance use. Consequently, Ms. L. utilized yelling, screaming, corporal punishment, and abandonment to manage her daughter's behaviors and achieve compliance with little to no consideration for her age.

Upon starting the program, Ms. L. was very resistant to service interventions due to her long-term unsuccessful history with finishing programs and her perceived lack of support. Due to this resistance, it was critical to utilize motivational interviewing at every session consistently and throughout the duration of the program to remind Ms L. of her own personal long-term goals with her children: to increase her daughter's compliance, establish a structured household, and maintain custody.

Throughout her time in the program, Ms. L. endured many hardships and faced many barriers such as the birth of her son, lack of transportation, and maintaining her methadone treatments daily. Ms. L's son was born with congenital birth defects which resulted in multiple hospitalizations, surgeries, and at home medical interventions. However, through all of these hardships, with consistent use of motivational interviewing and personalization of goals, Ms. L. remained motivated to complete the parenting program and maintained contact with the Family Support Specialist.

With the incorporation of our evidenced-based parenting model used in combination with motivational interviewing, Ms. L. began seeing a significant increase in compliance and was able to incorporate structured routines such as bedtime, bath time, clean-up, and feeding schedules which served as additional motivation to maintain the modifications to her parenting style she made in our program. Ms. L. made significant changes that we were able to measure through direct observation by other providers such as DSS case managers, her probation officer, and hospital social worker as well as on improvements she made from her pre-service measures to those we collected at the end of our services. Ms. L. is a wonderful example because even though she started our program approximately three times in the past and is a veteran of multiple service interventions, she finished successfully and the changes she made were so profound that it was evident to all of her other providers in the community, many of which have been working with her for several years.