Adapting Family Foundations for Home Visiting with Low-Income Parents

Although home visiting programs seek to engage fathers in services, typical program delivery focuses on child development and primarily works with mothers. Adapting and enhancing programs to be appealing and relevant to fathers as well requires innovative approaches. We will describe adaptations made to FF to create the FF@Home adaptation, and relate our experiences implementing the enhancement to promote infant mental health through effective coparenting among low-income, low-education, young, or non-coresiding mother-father dyads. Particular attention will be given to the implications of challenges to mothers and fathers due to experiences of violence and abuse, living in different homes, and no-longer romantically involved couples.

FF@Home is delivered by a male-female home-visiting team that provides 6 prenatal sessions and 5 postnatal sessions, ancillary to standard home visiting targeting mothers. The FF@Home adaptations were directed towards increasing the relevance of this program for parents who may not be living together or in a romantic relationship, but who are committed to parenting their child together. We sought to diminish the emphasis on couples being in a romantic relationship and emphasize the importance of supporting one another in raising a healthy child while facing multiple financial, extended family, and community stressors. FF@Home topics include setting parenting goals, recognizing feelings, managing conflict, problem solving, and stress management strategies. To increase father engagement, we added prenatal and postnatal one-on-one sessions between the male facilitator and father. This is an experiential intervention that utilizes modeling, interactive activities, and instructive video clips. We will engage in active discussion about challenges faced and solutions generated in working with this high-risk population, and there will be use of videotaped examples to demonstrate processes and skills.