The study examined two components of a family support program, a mothers' self‐help discussion group and a parent education group, to determine their effects on social support and parenting stress. Findings suggest that, after three months of program participation, mothers in both groups felt less social isolation and parenting stress than did mothers in the control group.

This three-generational study investigated family histories of attachment relationships and abusive experiences as well as current functioning of family members that differentiate supportive from unsupportive mothers of sexually abused children. Interviews and standardized adult and child measures were administered to a sample, including (a) 99 nonoffending African American mothers and their children aged 4 to 12 years, of whom 61 mothers were classified as supportive and 38 were classified as unsupportive, and (b) 52 grandmothers, of whom 33 were the mothers of supportive mothers and 19 were the mothers of unsupportive mothers. The authors' findings indicate that a history of conflicted and/or disrupted attachment relationships between grandmother and mother, and mother and child, and less support provided by the grandmother to the child characterize families in which sexually abused children do not receive maternal support. Also, nonsupportive mothers showed more substance abuse, criminal behaviors, and problematic relationships with male partners.

This study examined vulnerability or resilience to intergenerational sexual abuse. The sample included 196 African American mothers and their children of which 96 were sexually abused and 100 had no reported incidents of abuse. Four groups were formed based on maternal report of a history of childhood sexual abuse and the child's abuse status: (a) sexually abused mothers of children who were not sexually abused, (b) sexually abused mothers whose child was sexually abused, (c) mothers with no history of sexual abuse whose children had no history of sexual abuse, and (d) mothers with no history of sexual abuse who had a sexually abused child. The findings indicate that mothers who break the cycle of abuse were functioning as well as the nonsexually abused mothers in the study. Furthermore, sexually abused mothers with abused children evidenced significantly more disturbed functioning than the other three groups of mothers, particularly in their attachment relationships.