Family Service Bureau’s clinical staff is working with New Community’s Harmony House to bring the residents of the transitional housing facility the Kids Club and Moms Empowerment programs. The two programs are designed to coincide with each other, with both the mothers and children of Harmony House, which is New Community’s transitional housing facility for homeless families, to participate in weekly groups.
Kids Club is a preventive intervention program that focuses on children’s knowledge about family violence; their attitudes and beliefs about families and family violence; their emotional adjustment; and their social behavior in the small group. The program is phase-based, such that early sessions are designed to enhance the child’s sense of safety, to develop the therapeutic alliance and to create a common vocabulary of emotions for making sense of violence experiences. Later sessions address responsibility for violence, managing emotions, family relationship paradigms, conflict and resolution. Activities rely on displacement and group lessons are reviewed and repeated, as needed, each week.
Moms Empowerment is a parenting program that provides support to mothers by empowering them to discuss the impact of the violence on their child’s development; to build parenting competence; to provide a safe place to discuss parenting fears and worries; and to build connections for the mother in the context of a supportive group. In essence, this ten-session intervention is aimed at improving a mother’s repertoire of parenting and disciplinary skills, and enhancing social and emotional adjustment, thereby reducing the children’s behavioral and adjustment difficulties.
The goals of Kids Club are to:
Reduce children’s internalizing and externalizing behavioral adjustment problems
Reduce children’s harmful attitudes and beliefs about the acceptability of violence
Enhance children’s ability to cope with violence by learning safety skills, additional conflict resolution skills and enhanced ability to identify and regulate emotions related to violence
The goals of the Moms Empowerment are to:
Reduce the level of each mother’s traumatic stress and violence exposure
Enhance each mother’s safety and ability to parent under stress
Provide support and resources in a group setting
For more information on the Kids Club and Mom Empowerment programs at the Family Service Bureau, call 973-412-2056.
The Family Service Bureau has offices located at 274 South Orange Ave. in Newark and 379 Kearny Ave. in Kearny, and is an affiliate of New Community Corporation.
