Helping Families — The Health Resources and Services Administration has awarded a grant of nearly $1 million to Drs. Karen Bonuck and Anne Murphy to evaluate a relationship-based parent-child therapy aimed at reducing the potential for child maltreatment among at-risk youngsters from infants through age 3. Dr. Murphy has used this innovative treatment with promising results among more than 100 families during the past five years; it seeks to build secure parent-child relationships in place of the standard parents-only skills training often used to prevent maltreatment. Through the rigorous trial Bonuck-Murphy team has designed, 100 at-risk Bronx families will be randomly assigned to either the new modality or to parent-only classes. A panel of child welfare policy and practice professionals will review their findings to determine whether the therapy may be translated to other treatment settings and geographic locales. Dr. Bonuck is professor of family & social medicine and of obstetrics & gynecology and women’s health. Dr. Murphy is assistant professor of pediatrics.
Posted on: Thursday, June 14, 2012