University of Alberta Edmonton, Canada May 30, 1997

Helping families bounce back

Innovative on-line course speeds transfer of research knowledge

By Lee Elliott

One in four children in the City of Edmonton under the age of seven lives in poverty.

It's tragic and inexusable. It's also costly, according to Dr. Jane Drummond, Faculty of Nursing. "Research shows these are the kids who go on to cost money-not just health dollars, but education, social services and justice dollars."

Drummond, along with Dr. Jane Alexander, Dr. Linda McDonald, Educational Psychology and Dr. Gerard Kysela, Faculty of Education are jointly testing treatment strategies with the families of children experiencing delays in social, mental or physical development in The Child and Family Resiliency Research Program.

"In the good old days, we used to be child focused," says Drummond. "As the years have gone by, we have become more family oriented. Family is the context of the child's life."

Just helping family members become more assertive or showing them how to get services like those offered by food banks helps children enormously, she says.

Therapists like graduate student Treva Lunan work with parents in the home, building on their strengths. "I think that's what's really good about it, it reinforces the natural kinds of things you do," she says. Lunan says she helps parents learn positive reinforcement techniques and ways of achieving perspective on a problem. She also models different behavior. "Often parents don't get down to the children's level," she says. "They'll see things work well between me and the children so they'll try it." The children in their study groups were all delayed at least six months in at least two areas of development, usually language or social. Their lives contained at least two risk factors, always poverty and generally English as a second language or single parents.

"We have found that the interventions helped the families that were in the treatment group hold their own over the first six months," says Drummond. The control families fared less well. "If you're looking for wild wonderful things, it's just not there," she says. However, preventing problems from becoming worse is important. The groups will be reevaluated at 12 and 21 months. "I think that these families will continue to hold their own," says Drummond, "while the others will become more disordered."

As quickly as the researchers acquire information, they want to share it with students and with professionals in the field. To do that, they've brought on yet another partner, the Faculty of Extension, to offer an on-line credit course. Students from across Alberta have already registered for the six-week summer session and will be learning from three professors, a teaching assistant and each other. The course has a strong mentorship component helped by the network of partners in the project. Partners include the U of C rehabilitiation program, Red Deer College, The Family Centre, CASA, Bretton and Buck Creek Brighter Futures project, ABC Head Start and CONNECT (Children's Services for Deaf Children.) Students will receive part of their mark for participation in the chat group. "It will be more interactive as it develops," says Drummond. She hopes the course will soon include case studies and video conferencing. The course will also be offered in the fall.

The on-line course is made possible through a $100,000 Province of Alberta Learning Enhancement Grant. The Child and Family Resiliency Research Programme is located in the Centre for Research in Applied Measurement and Evaluation (C.R.A.M.E.) in the Faculty of Education at the U of A.

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