This academic year marks the 15th anniversary of USF St. Petersburg’s Family Study Center, a pioneering institution at the forefront of coparenting research and community programs for early childhood and family mental health.
Coparenting is an emerging child development model that expands the perception of family units beyond biological mothers, fathers and children to include all caregivers who develop close bonds and are responsible for the care and upbringing of young children. For example, grandparents who are with infants daily or daycare providers who care for a young child 30-40 hours each week function as coparents.
“We look at children’s families as they actually really are, not at how others might think they ought to be,” said Dr. James McHale, Director of the Family Study Center since its inception. “When you look across all children and all cultures, the overwhelming majority are coparented by multiple individuals over the course of their young lives.”
All of the Family Study Center’s research and programs are geared toward strengthening relationships and coordination among various coparents who are raising children. The Center’s work throughout the past 15 years has been influential locally, nationally and internationally in establishing and spreading this groundbreaking model.
Coparenting networks include families led by married and unmarried parents, divorced parents and reconstituted stepfamilies, multigenerational families where grandparents, parents and other kinship members co-raise children, and situations where children’s own parents and temporary foster parents coparent together until the child and parents can be reunified. Research at the Family Study Center explores ways to best strengthen each of these unique networks. In addition, the Center’s research informs community partnerships that range from childcare collaboratives to justice system collaborations with jails and children’s courts to hospital-based trauma services for families from pregnancy to age three.
“We concentrate our energies on this period in children’s lives because 80-85% of children’s brain wiring and development is completed by the age of three. Future learning, social and emotional development is based upon this infrastructure that has largely been laid down by then,” said McHale.
In one such initiative, the Family Study Center collaborates with Pinellas County’s Early Childhood Court (ECC). ECCs are a state-wide system of courts overseen by judges who address unique legal challenges faced by infants and toddlers, such as child welfare and removal from biological parents. The Center partners with the courts and numerous other community partners to minimize the traumatic effects of removal.
“Our role is to discuss best practices with judges and community providers for meeting the social and emotional needs of infants and toddlers and their families as it relates to separation and time in foster care,” said Ebony Miller, Coordinator for the Infant Family Mental Health Graduate Certificate Program at USF St. Petersburg.
Technical assistance, consultations and trainings are provided around coparenting and children’s mental health. The Pinellas ECC includes several unique features, including icebreaker meetings between biological and foster parents after the child’s removal, and a communication plan that encourages child-related conversations between biological and foster parents. Communication – by phone, FaceTime or Skype when in-person visits do not occur – is strongly encouraged to give infants and toddlers contact with biological parents to reduce the trauma of separation.
“The end goal is reunifying child with parents within 12 months of separation, or if that isn’t possible then streamlining adoption with foster parents or establishing permanent guardians with relatives of the child,” said Miller. “State-wide we are seeing improvements related to these goals.”
Another Family Study Center initiative is its Infant Family Center, established in 2015 through a collaboration with Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital. The Infant Family Center serves families whose children have suffered trauma during their first years of life. McHale serves as its Executive Director and the Family Study Center’s Assistant Director Lisa Negrini oversees its clinical training and provides supervision for the Center’s dedicated clinicians.
The Infant Family Center helps support a growing need in Pinellas County for intensive trauma-informed family-centered services for very young children working to overcome the adverse impacts of trauma and toxic stress.
“We are seeing more cases of children who are in situations where there are adverse childhood experiences, things such as parental substance abuse, neglect or child abuse,” said Jessica Lassiter, Intake and Assessment Coordinator for the Infant Family Mental Health Center.
Referrals come from agencies working with families of infants and toddlers, such as home visiting programs and childcare centers. Challenging behavioral issues are a common concern. Addressing each child’s circumstances from a coparenting frame, staff use consultations, Child-Parent Psychotherapy and group interventions to promote attachment and family-level security.
“In some cases, the behavior of the child rekindles painful issues the parent went through in life that they never dealt with, so parents as much as children come here to repair and heal from past trauma,” added Lassiter.
Among the longer-standing community events the Family Study Center takes part in is Baby Talk Week, entering its 9th consecutive year. Built with the Concerned Organizations for Quality Education of Black Students (COQEBS), this multi-day program celebrates and builds upon the love, strengths and wisdom of families in the community, with events for parents, childcare providers and agencies serving higher-risk children.
National experts come to USF St. Petersburg during Baby Talk Week – which next takes place February of 2019 – to discuss infants’ and toddlers’ natural curiosity and drive to explore and discover. Baby Talk aims to strengthen family-community support systems so that all young children can get off to the best possible start in life.
The Family Study Center’s emphasis on coparenting and applied research that can improve the lives of infants, young children and families have both advanced the field and benefitted area children and families. In May 2018, the Center’s “Figuring It Out for the Child” program for unmarried parents was recognized by St. Petersburg’s 2020 Plan Task Force as one of the city’s ten most impactful programs for families.
“The Family Study Center is unique on the national scene as it only undertakes initiatives where coparenting is the primary focus,” said McHale. “Hundreds of Centers serve mothers and infants or study parents and families. But no others hold this conceptual model at the core of all their work. Coparenting views the family through the eyes of the baby or young child. And for that reason, it is central to the future of the field.”