HUMAN SERVICES
St. David‘s Child
Development &
Family Services
INTERNATIONAL
CARE: Afghan Women
as Entrepreneurs
HOUSING
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St. David’s Child Development & Family Services Minneapolis, Minnesota |
2004 $10,795 Grant |
St. David’s Child Development & Family Services was awarded $10,795 from the Sundance Family Foundation to assist the teen STEEP program with its Research/Evaluation Project. STEEP, which stands for Steps Towards Effective Enjoyable Parenting, works with at-risk teen mothers who are going through a first pregnancy. The program addresses parent/infant issues in a preventive manner, facilitating psycho/social development to secure parent-infant bonding, and skill development to teach parents how to parent effectively. The STEEP program catches young mothers, ages 15-19, early in the parenting process and prevents costly intervention down the road, where negative patterns and behaviors may become established and more difficult to address.
The Sundance grant helps STEEP conduct research and evaluation of its 2-1/2 year process, which supports teen mothers from the prenatal stage, through the birth of their babies, and until the child is 2- to 2-1/2 years old. Careful evaluation will track and document outcomes of progress and facilitate replication of the program. “The accuracy of our evaluation process is a key to our success in being a strong model for other agencies to emulate and trust,” according to St. David’s staff. Understanding the data collected will help ensure that proper services are available to this vulnerable population of young parents and infants.
Without funding for evaluation, outcomes of progress would go undocumented, making effective services to teen mothers and their babies less predictable.
Sara is a good example of how the program works. During Sara’s first well-baby visit, her public health nurse was concerned that Sara and her newborn faced an overwhelming number of risk factors, and she referred Sara to the STEEP program. The nurse had observed that Sara was unresponsive to her baby’s cries and appeared overwhelmed by the demands of parenting. Her current boyfriend and father of her baby offered material support, but was unable to provide the emotional support necessary for an infant. In addition, Sara shared with the public health nurse that she had been brought up by a drug-dependent mother and that she had been in and out of several foster homes during childhood. She admitted that she felt she did not have a “maternal map” for parenting her baby.
The STEEP program helped first by providing concrete staples such as a crib and diapers to the young family. The staff then began regular visits to share information with both parents on child development and on basic parenting skills. Finally, Sara began attending biweekly support groups at St. David’s, sharing stories of her own upbringing and how it had impacted her. This allowed Sara the opportunity to reflect on her life and to expand her own sensitivity to her baby. She made friends and developed parenting and child development skills, which helped Sara find the ability to be more responsive to the well being of her baby, and to stabilize her young family.
The St. David’s Child Development STEEP Program, conceived in 1999 as an adult parenting program, expanded to include teens, and had its first class of teen moms and babies enrolled in 2003. Teen attendance has been strong and home visits are consistent. Almost all mothers are in school, completing coursework and receiving high school diplomas. Many community resources are used beyond the STEEP program and post secondary education is encouraged and utilized by many inspired young mothers. The evaluation of this preventive approach will help to codify results and formalize the program so that it can be implemented more broadly and reach more vulnerable teen families.
Copyright 2006 Sundance Family Foundation. All rights reserved.