The measurement of effective parenting in Native communities

In Native communities across North America, there are initiatives currently being taken by Native people to develop culturally relevant child welfare programs to deal with the problems of child maltreatment. One example of such a program is Cherish the Children, a training program developed by the Minnesota Indian Women’s Resource Centre to teach “parenting skills to Indian mothers with young children” (Minnesota Indian Women’s Resource Center, 1988). It was developed by Anishnabe (Ojibway) people and encourages Anishnabe parents to return to “the old ways” of parenting. The purpose of this study was to develop a culturally-sensitive instrument that would measure effectively parenting in a Native family. The instrument, called the Cherish the Children Questionnaire, was to be used to evaluate the outcomes of Native parenting programs. In addition to establishing the reliability and validity of the instrument, the study also tested the hypothesis that there was a difference in parenting between Native and Euro-Canadian parents. The results indicated that the reliability of the Cherish the Children Questionnaire, using a Cronbach’s Alpha test of internal consistency is high (.89). The correlation between the IPBI and the C.T.C., suggested a reasonable validity (.47). Finally, based on the results of a t-test comparing the scores of Native and non-Native parents on the C.T.C. Questionnaire, the instrument did distinguish between Native and non-Native parents. The limitations of the study and of the instrument included the fact that the results of the factor analysis were inconclusive. The instrument would have to be tested on a much larger sample to obtain more meaningful results. Another limitation is that validity has not been clearly established. Assessment by workers offering the Cherish the Children program of parents before and after participation in the program could be used in the future as a test of criterion validity