Strengthening Families Program

The Strengthening Families Program (SFP) is a parenting and family skills training program that consists of 14 consecutive weekly skill-building sessions. Parents and children work separately in training sessions and then participate together in a session practicing the skills they learned earlier. Two booster sessions are used at 6 months to 1 year after the primary course. Children’s skills training sessions concentrate on setting goals, dealing with stress and emotions, communication skills, responsible behavior, and how to deal with peer pressure. Topics in the parental section include setting rules, nurturing, monitoring compliance, and applying appropriate discipline. SFP was developed and tested in 1983 with 6- to 12-year-old children of parents in substance abuse treatment. Since then, culturally modified versions and age-adapted versions (for 3- to 5-, 10- to 14-, and 13- to 17-year-olds) with new manuals have been evaluated and found effective for families with diverse backgrounds: African-American, Asian/Pacific Islander, Hispanic, American Indian, Australian, and Canadian.

The goals of this program are to improve parenting skills and children’s behaviors and decrease conduct disorders; to improve children’s social competencies; and to improve family attachment, harmony, communication, and organization.

SFP has been evaluated at least 18 times on Federal grants and at least 150 times on State grants by independent evaluators. The original National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) study involved a true pretest, posttest, and follow-up experimental design with random assignment of families to one of four experimental groups: 1) parent training only, 2) parent training plus children’s skills training, 3) the complete SFP including the family component, and 4) no treatment besides substance abuse treatment for parents. SFP was then culturally adapted and evaluated with five Center for Substance Abuse Prevention High-Risk Youth Program grants by independent evaluators using statistical control group designs that involved quasi-experimental, pretest, posttest, and 6-, 12-, 18-, and 24-month follow-ups. Recently, SFP was compared with a popular school-based aggression prevention program (I Can Problem Solve) and found highly effective (effect sizes = .45 to 1.38), employing a true experimental pretest–posttest, 12-month, and 24-month follow-up design in two Utah school districts. A NIDA four-group randomized clinical trial with about 800 primarily African-American families in the Washington, DC, area also found good results.

University of Kansas researchers, Dr. Jody Brook and Dr. McDonald (2012) published that SFP cut the days in foster care by half from 258 days to 125 days using CPS recorded. Also, Dr. Gene Brody and associates (2009, 2010, 2012), at U Georgia have published that SFP reduced diagnosed substance abuse, depression/anxiety, delinquency and HIV risk by 50% in genetically at risk 18 year olds (presence of one or two short alleles of the 5-HTTLPR serotonin transporter gene). Saliva tests were conducted five years after African American youth and families participated in an African American culturally tailored version of SFP 10-14 Years in randomized schools.