Monday, September 10, 2007
Researchers at the University of Kansas are working to combat poor parenting with an unlikely tool: the cell phone. University scientists have received a grant to give cell phones to young mothers to put them in constant contact with parenting coaches.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC Foundation and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation have given $1.6 million to senior scientist Judith Carta and her team to study the how effective the cell phones will be in curbing mistreatment of children over the next four years.
Carta and her colleagues will give the cell phones to young, single, low-income mothers in the Kansas City area who are already participating in parenting programs. Young, first-time parents have many competing priorities that make involvement in a parenting program a lower one, Carta said.
“Cell phones give us a way to stay in touch with them, keep them engaged and remember the parenting skills they are learning in the intervention, and get ideas for how they can apply those skills in their daily routines with their children,” Carta said.
The cell phones will work as an extension of Planned Activities Training, a program designed to instruct mothers at high risk for child neglection. The program is supposed to reduce children’s challenging behavior by giving parents knowledge and skills needed to help their children through daily routines such as eating breakfast and getting dressed.
Planned Activities Training is based on home visits by parenting coaches. A recent study, also performed by Carta, showed that nearly 50 percent of home meetings had to be re-scheduled because of mothers’ hectic schedules. When cell phones were given to the mothers, meetings occurred as scheduled about 95 percent of the time.
The cell phones and call plans, donated by AT&T, will allow parenting coaches to send daily text messages suggesting a planned activity, giving appointment reminders and making general check-ups.
The previous study showed that preliminary use of the cell phones with single mothers had helped to detect and prevent maltreatment. On one occasion when a researcher called an adolescent mother to check on her baby, the mother said her baby was “extra good” because he had not needed feeding or diaper changes and had been sleeping for 24 hours. But the researcher told her she should take the baby to the hospital and used the cell phone to guide the mother and baby to the emergency room. The baby was treated and saved but had almost died from dehydration.
Another case of maltreatment found by a researcher involved a teen who reported that her child had slept under a sink while the baby’s grandmother cared for other children.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, maltreatment during the early stages of childhood can cause physical, mental, and emotional problems such as sleep disturbances, panic disorder and attention-deficit disorder. More than 2 million cases of child maltreatment are reported each year in the U.S.
Andrea Zarate, Bonner Springs senior and mother of a two-year-old boy, said she thought the cell phone program would be a good idea. While Zarate is not a single mother, she is still very busy.
“My daily schedule can be pretty hectic, but I have learned how to manage my time, which is one of the most important things,” Zarate said. “A lot of people tell me, ‘I couldn’t do it,’ but the truth is they could do it if they had no choice. All of us are dealt a different hand, and how we manage it makes us who we are.”
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