Mom Power: Fostering New Growth in Appalachian Tennessee

Mom Power (MP) is a trauma-informed parenting intervention which aims to break the cycle of intergenerational risk transmission by promoting enhanced parent-child attachment, increased social support, connection to community services, and utilization of self-care skills. MP was developed to engage vulnerable families (e.g., mothers with trauma histories, low income, single mothers) and seeks to mitigate common treatment accessibility barriers for underserved populations through provision of childcare, transportation, and a trauma-informed/culturally sensitive milieu. Results from a community-based randomized control trial (RCT) in Michigan (MI) have shown that MP is effective at reducing maternal psychopathology, lowering parenting stress, decreasing parental hopelessness, and promoting reflective parenting; however, no studies have examined the feasibility of implementing MP outside of MI, nor the effectiveness of MP with additional samples (Rosenblum et al., 2017). The present study is a hybrid implementation/effectiveness design that is two-fold: (1) Implementation design to assess the feasibility of training rural, Appalachian community-based providers in the MP model, recruiting high risk mothers, retaining mothers in this 10-week intervention, and implementing MP groups with community-based partners (2) An effectiveness oriented, pre-post, within subjects design with mothers of young children who are attending MP groups in the community [n = 33 mothers; M maternal age = 26 (SD = 5) years; M child age = 12 months (SD = 15)]. Regarding implementation results, the MP training involved n = 31 community-based providers from 5 agencies (e.g., community mental health, foster care agency) and 3 university-based mental health training programs. In the 18 months since training, three 10-week MP groups have been completed (n = 25 mother-child dyads), and one group is currently being held (n = 8 dyads). Regarding recruitment, we have had great success reaching high risk families, having more family referrals than available group slots. Of the families served in TN thus far, 60% had DCS involvement, 46% were in substance abuse treatment, 68% endorsed ≤ 4 ACEs, 77% had clinically significant depression, 58% had clinically significant anxiety, 78% were single/had no co-parent, 81% had low educational attainment, and 100% were below the federal poverty level. Regarding effectiveness, following completion of the current group, we will present pre-/post- differences in maternal PTSD symptoms, emotion regulation, and parenting behavior, as well as examine the relationship between attendance and change scores