We are excited to announce that the 2021 Small Grants have been awarded to Dr. Tuyen Huynh from the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Dr. Janean Dilworth-Bart from the School of Human Ecology.
Dr. Huynh will use the funds for her project with Dr. Holly Hatton-Bowers of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln: A Community-Based Pilot Feasibility Study to Adapt the CHIME+ Program to Build Resilience Among Minoritized Families.
Abstract: Family resilience is dependent on individual emotional well-being and strong family relationships, which are key protective factors associated with effective emotion regulation and positive child development. Unfortunately, poor parent emotional well-being is tightly linked with high parenting stress, resulting in less sensitive parenting approaches (e.g., emotional unavailability) and undermining critical regulatory processes related to adaptive emotion regulation and secure parent-child relationship necessary for the development and sustainability of family resilience. Specifically, racial/ethnic minority families disadvantaged by poverty and health disparities can exhibit elevated parenting stress and may lack intrapersonal coping resources required to consistently engage in responsive caregiving in a stressful environment, heightened by economic hardship. In partnership with the United Methodist Children’s Services in Wisconsin, the goal of this study is to systematically adapt and implement a community-based mindfulness-based program, Cultivating Healthy Intentional Mindful Educators + Families (CHIME+), with low-income, racial/ethnic minority families with young children.The overarching goal is to equip parents with mindfulness skills that are feasible to implement and acceptable to them for use in promoting their own emotional well-being (e.g., reducing parenting stress), with anticipated positive spillover effects into their parenting behaviors. Conducting this study will have a three-fold impact, including (1) generating the pertinent knowledge required to successfully adapt the CHIME+ program to meet parents’ needs specifically, (2) ensuring the long-term sustainability of the program to improve the well-being of families with young children in Wisconsin, thereby contributing to efforts to promote health equity, and (3) providing preliminary findings to support future subsequent RCT studies of the CHIME+ program with this population.
Dr. Dilworth-Bart will be using the funds for her project: Centering community voices of parents and caregivers of children 0-11 years old in Wisconsin through community-led conversations to support health, wellness, and well-being for children and families.
Abstract: Inequities contribute to poor health and well-being outcomes for children and families. To address this, the UW-Madison Prenatal to Five Initiative (P25) has developed a partnership with Healthy Early (a cross-sector, statewide partnership) and the Wisconsin Department of Health Services’ Maternal and Child Health Program (MCH). Healthy Early, the MCH program, and P25 initiative have separately identified health and wellness priorities from stakeholder surveys and are further wanting to center equity and community voice in ongoing and future efforts. ‘Ground-truthing’ these priorities with community members is desperately needed, especially within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and increased awareness of racial inequities. In 2020, partners identified and piloted the concept of community-led conversations as a potential means for engaging and empowering parents and caregivers who are most impacted by health disparities.
This project seeks to:
1) further utilize community-led conversations specifically with the Latinx community;
2) retrospectively evaluate, through a survey, if community-led conversations (from 2020, 2021, and within this project) are effective in capturing community voices; and
3) seek to understand how the findings generated from community conversations could facilitate action (within community, within organizations, agencies and associations’ priorities and resource allocation, and within academic institution’s future research