The Weaving Healthy Families program: Promoting parenting practices, family resilience, and communal mastery

Abstract

Parenting quality, family resilience, and community resilience and support have been found to be primary protective factors for the disproportionate burden of anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), substance use disorder (SUD), depression, and suicide that US Indigenous youth and adults tend to experience. The purpose of this research study was to examine pilot results for outcomes related to relational factors for Indigenous family members who participated in the Weaving Healthy Families (WHF) program (translated to Chukka Auchaffi’ Natana, in the Choctaw tribal language), a culturally grounded and empirically informed program geared toward promoting wellness, family resilience, parenting practices, and community resilience while also preventing SUD and violence. This nonrandomized pre‐experimental pilot intervention followed a longitudinal design, which included pre‐test, a post‐test, and a 6‐, 9‐, and 12‐month post‐intervention follow‐up surveys. Repeated‐measures regressions were utilized with generalized estimating equations (GEE) to examine changes in parenting, family resilience, and communal mastery before and after the intervention for 24 adults and adolescents (12–17) across eight tribal families. Results indicate that the overall quality of parenting improved, as measured by improved parental monitoring and reductions in inconsistent discipline and corporal punishment. We identified sex differences in positive parenting, poor monitoring, and corporal punishment, with greater decreases in these measures among males over time. Family resilience and communal mastery improved for adolescent and adult participants after the WHF program. Our results indicate promising improvements across relational, familial, and community ecological, which provide clear clinical implications.

Associations Between Family Resilience, Child Flourishing, and School Engagement Among Children in Kinship Care

“…In addition to child-family team meetings that promote family-wide communication and planning around child welfare cases, there is potential to adapt existing family resilience interventions to the needs of kinship families. The FOCUS Family Resilience and Weaving Healthy Families Programs have shown promising effects in promoting positive parenting, social functioning, and intergenerational psychological well-being among military-involved and American Indian families, respectively (McKinley et al, 2023; Saltzman, 2016). Given both interventions are designed to be administered in community-based settings, they can be implemented within kinship navigator programs that are accessible to all kinship families, which may address the resource gap between formal and informal kinship families (Beltran & Epstein, 2013; Berrick & Hernandez, 2016).…”

Family resilience of cancer patients: a concept analysis

“…Resilient families are characterized by perseverance, hope, optimism, openness, a sense of responsibility, and initiative. [16][17][18]…”