Trainings and Conferences

A National Child Traumatic Stress Network Community Treatment and Services Site

In January 2003, Parsons was awarded a $1.02 million grant to establish the Parsons Child Trauma Study Center to serve the Capital Region. The grant is part of the newly created National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN), a first-of-its-kind program in the United States designed to raise the standard of care and improve access to services for traumatized children.

The grant is part of $60 million earmarked over three years for child trauma from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Parsons, one of 80 agencies nationwide that applied for the grant, is the only residential child care program in the network.

Parsons provides services to approximately 7,000 children and their families each year through a wide range of programs including home-based family preservation, an outpatient child and family therapy clinic, foster family care, a crisis residence, day treatment, residential treatment, and a small psychiatric residential treatment facility. Children and parents referred to Parsons typically have experienced severe and chronic neglect and family violence. Most children show significant symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and severe attachment problems related to neglect, multiple losses, and separations from parents. Provision of services is complicated by the high risk of continued abuse or neglect of children. Children referred to Parsons' programs have almost always experienced themselves as victims or witnesses of family violence that has often extended through several generations. At the time of referral, children are often guarding secrets regarding unresolved traumas. Children and adolescents referred are also often at high risk of continuing to hurt themselves or others.

A central challenge in this work has been to implement research-based interventions with children who have learned that they are not safe from continued abuse, neglect, rejections, or abandonment. They are children who have learned that they could not trust parents, extended family members, and often service providers to care for, protect, and guide them to maturity.

To address this challenge, Parsons' staff members have developed innovative approaches to engage and assist children, parents, substitute parents, and service providers in working to overcome the impact of serial traumas. Creative arts and narrative interventions have been utilized to help children succeed in building strengths through a series of tasks, including work to:

• Expand memories of positive experiences.
• Develop cognitive and self-regulation skills.
• Find and engage adults who care enough about a child to stand up, protect, and guide them.
• Help children to see that they are not alone.
• Find strength-based modalities that foster use of words, images, music or dance to share experiences.
• Reframe traumas from unspoken nightmares to hard times that children, youths, and caring parents (or substitute parents) can overcome.

Research Activities

Since 2003, the Parsons Child Trauma Study Center staff have been working with other sites on collaborative research to share and test the validity of central premises and the effectiveness of interventions utilized with children at high risk of foster care or psychiatric placement, and children who have been placed into foster family care, emergency crisis residences, residential treatment or psychiatric hospitals. The focus of the research is to develop interventions that foster the courage, understanding, and commitment that children need to surmount losses, separations, and family violence. Critical interventions are hypothesized to include:

• Reframing traumas as challenges for all family members.
• Coaching parents, relatives, child care workers, and substitute parents to listen to children and to validate their experiences.
• Implement protocols with service providers and referral sources that avoid pathologizing and stigmatizing children and parents by service systems.
• Helping children and parents develop affect regulation skills, understand how traumas work, and work together to overcome traumas, and by doing so, rebuild hope and trust.

Narrative and creative arts approaches are utilized to help children develop the ability to coherently understand and share their experiences. The intent of these interventions is to go beyond traditional life story work in child welfare services and to build a story of people who demonstrate care for a child based on strength, courage, and belonging. The Real Life Heroes model (Kagan, 2004) is utilized to engage caring adults and children in an activity-based therapeutic program. The heroes in this approach are real people who define what it means for a child to have a family, to overcome hardships, and to live within a community.

Through our participation in the Network, we have the unique opportunity of working with world-renowned researchers and practitioners in the field of traumatic stress. This will allow us to operate on a national level in the area of research, practice and training. The resulting products and services-new training curriculum, Real Life Heroes book, expressive arts therapies, new assessment tools, new treatment protocols and data collection protocols, to name a few-will improve our abilities to care for our children and their families at Parsons and to extend this expertise through a series of training and consultation programs to practitioners at other agencies. Network involvement has also helped us to sponsor a series of regional training programs for practitioners in the Northeast.