Parent Cafés

What is a Parent Café?

The Parent Café is a family-based  and parent led program designed by Be Strong Families to facilitate peer-to-peer learning around five evidence-based protective factors that improve resilience and strengthen supports within families:

• Resilience: Be strong and flexible

• Relationships: Caregivers need friends

• Support: We all need help sometimes

• Knowledge: Caregiving is part natural and part learned

• Communication: Children need help communicating

What is the goal of the Parent Café innovation?

Parent Cafés are designed to address stigmas around mental health and behavioral health challenges within families by providing a safe space for caregivers to share lived experiences and receive concrete support, including referrals to behavioral health specialists.

Why Parent Cafés?

Close to 47 percent of children in District of Columbia have experienced at least one adverse childhood experience (ACE). The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention identified evidence-based strategies to prevent ACEs that include:

• Strengthening supports for families

• Ensuring a strong start for children

• Teaching skills

• Connecting youth to caring adults and activities

Parent Cafés build on all of these strategies.

What makes the Parent Café unique?

Parent Cafés use a new and different format for gathering people together. The format guides parent-to-parent interactions and socialization to create conversation filled with reflection, sharing, and support.

Parent Cafés are a human-centered approach. Community partners and parent leaders are engaged at every step of developing the innovation. This ensures that our innovation addresses the issues that are impactful and relevant to the people and communities we serve.

Parent Cafés also provide parents with peer-to-peer support and create an opportunity for people to share the triumphs and challenges of caregivers.

 How do you know Parent Cafés are working?

Caregivers who participated in Parent Cafés give overwhelmingly positive feedback about their engagement, sense of connectedness to a community of caregivers, and their intentions to return to more sessions.

How do families lead Parent Cafés?

Parent Cafés promote family leadership by creating an intimate safe place where parents and other caregivers can interact with each other and build positive outcomes together. Participants make and keep meaningful relationships in their communities and work together to support each other.

Parent Cafés also establish the means for ongoing support. For example, first time attendees may decide to attend more cafés and may sign up for training to become Parent Café Hosts themselves.

Do Parent Cafés speak to ECIN’s racial equity goals?

We continue to build relationships with caregivers and community partners with the hope of achieving racial equity in this work. We constantly evaluate ourselves and carefully review caregiver feedback to decide which inequities can be addressed as a high priority through cross-sector collaborations and partnerships.

How will Parent Cafés keep growing?

• The number of trained Parent Café Hosts will gradually expand as planning, systems creation, and additional funding continues.

• A Training of the Trainer model will grow the Parent Café Community of Practice to engage more Hosts.

• We also hope to continue increasing our partner network to help Parent Cafés spread throughout the District of Columbia and surrounding areas.

• We are on the way to becoming a Parent Café training hub with Be Strong Families.

• We intend to explore other Parent Café training capabilities to potentially cover (but not limited to): trauma and loss grief, parents with children who have disabilities, or vitality.

• We are exploring the creation of a “café deck” which engage people in creating the deck and then using the deck to directly work with and support the families/communities we service.

How do Parent Cafés make a difference to policy and/or existing systems?  

We remain committed to advocating for family-based programs that will help to build a stronger, more resilient community.

The team continuously collects data to evaluate the effectiveness of our work. The data will also be used to make the case for funding family-based programs and other programs with similar goals. 

See Parent Café training options, dates in 2024, and how to sign-up.

Videos

Publications

Dafilou C, Feinberg A, Mitchell S, Baylor R, Caleb S, Altoonian K, Bodrick N. Professional Hats Aside: How Parent Cafés Reduce Perceived Power Differentials to Engage Caregivers in Adverse Childhood Experience Prevention Using the Protective Factors Framework. Social Current. October 2023.

Posters

Mitchell S, Holmes L, Feinberg A, Bodrick N. Participant Endorsement of Parent Cafés: Variation by Demographics and Number of Cafés Attended. Presented at Children’s National Hospital Research Week, Washington, D.C. April 2023.

Mitchell S, Holmes L, Feinberg A, Bodrick N. Participant Endorsement of Parent Cafés: Variation by Demographics and Number of Cafés Attended. Presented at American Academy of Pediatrics National Conference and Exhibition, Washington, D.C. October 2023. 

Presentation

Dafilou C, Feinberg A, Mitchell S, Baylor R, Caleb S, Altoonian K, Bodrick N. Professional Hats Aside: How Parent Cafés Reduce Perceived Power Differentials to Engage Caregivers in Adverse Childhood Experience Prevention Using the Protective Factors Framework. Presented at American Public Health Association Annual Meeting, Atlanta, Georgia. November 2023.

For more information, email the team.