Impacting Parenting from a Place of Strength: Looking Back to Move Forward

You may forget what people did for you, but you will never forget how they made you feel.

~ Tanya, Parenting Journey graduate

Tanya was excited about joining a Parenting Journey 1 group! She had heard that parents enjoyed the group. Parenting Journey—a Greater Boston-based organization that helps families heal and grow—offered them the space for self-reflection and they grew their support network through new connections with parents and staff. 

She was also hesitant. Having lost custody of her children, Tanya was overwhelmed and frustrated. She felt judged, unsupported, and leary of sharing her most difficult challenges with people she did not know. 

In the weeks to come, Tanya would start to open up in her “PJ1” group. She felt safe talking through her deepest emotions and fears. Tanya found a safe space where she could share candidly without feeling judged. In the PJ1 group, she was treated with respect and she moved past the stigma that she was a “bad parent.” She learned that she brought her own wisdom to her family and to her group, and she was nurtured by the wisdom of the other PJ1 parents. By the end of her 12-week Parenting Journey group, Tanya was using words like “joy” and said that she felt respected—and that she had found a new sense of belonging. Her communication and organizational skills had improved. Her self-perspective had shifted, and she was full of enthusiasm and hope about her family’s future. 

Parenting is always a journey—filled with ups and downs, gifts and challenges. For families who face financial hardships, that journey can be especially difficult. They must contend with family health and wellbeing at foundational levels—ensuring that basic needs are met with few resources and limited support. Like all parents, those who are parenting in poverty want what is best for their children. Still, the barriers persist. Recognizing this reality, Parenting Journey was created to help parents with limited resources and social networks to not only survive, but to thrive. 

Parenting Journey was founded in 1982 by family therapist, artist, and social justice activist Anne Peretz and her mentor and fellow family therapist, David Kantor. It takes an approach to unleashing the unique potential within each family that’s foundational to each of Parenting Journey’s curriculum and is present in all of Parenting Journey’s programming. We call this philosophy “NEST,” which is short for:

• Non-didactic: programs are not aimed at teaching how to parent; they help to identify the strengths needed to parent
• Evidence-based: the core program has proven to help parents transition from negative to positive feelings about themselves and life in general 
• Strengths-focused: programs hone in on what parents are already good at and amplify it, rather than focusing on weaknesses
• Trauma-informed: programs are designed to acknowledge the impact of past experiences and create a safe space for growth

In this way, Parenting Journey shifts traditional deficit-based approaches to family support to strengths-focused approaches. This shift was critical for Tanya as she moved through Parenting Journey 1. Instead of seeing herself as a “bad parent,” Tanya began to see what she was doing right, to build confidence from that place, and to adopt the approaches, mindsets, and strategies that would ultimately lead to her family being together—happier and healthier.

Go Back and Get It!

As a tenured organization with deep roots in family systems theory, Parenting Journey has a long-standing commitment to parent and family health and wellness. Yet, it is in a sense, on its own journey. Our early impact as a mental health clinic offering individual and family therapy groups would eventually evolve into the Parenting Journey that we know today—an organization dedicated to transforming family and community wellbeing by disrupting traditional practices and prevalent narratives about parenting in poverty. 

In making this shift, we needed to consider what is fueling our mission and vision. How can we not only work to support the parents and families who are core to our mission, but also insure that we avoid unintentionally perpetuating the same challenges and narratives that confine parents and families to the very deficit-based models we seek to change? What can we do to elevate our focus on root causes thereby growing the shift to more proactive practices? Building from the core belief that parents want what is best for their children and families, it became clear that as an organization, we needed our own Parenting Journey experiential moment.

We needed a Sankofa moment, if you will. Sankofa is an expression in the Twi language of Ghana. Its literal meaning is “go back and get it!” The more expansive Akan proverb reminds us that “if you forget and you go back to get it, there is nothing wrong with it.” There is a “diligence required to take due cognizance of the past to give it its proper place in the present.” (Adinkra Symbols and Meanings, www.adinkrasymbols.org). At Parenting Journey, we needed to reflect on the past so that we could move forward. Who knew that the practices that Anne Peretz and David Kantor developed 42 years ago for parents would apply to organizations, too. 

For most of our history, we have been a regionally-based organization. Our roots in Massachusetts and New York and our subsequent presence in other states in New England and in the Northeast, coupled with our early stance as a clinic and direct services provider, meant that we had a substantive base for learning how to best support parents. We know, for example, that Parenting Journey’s psychoeducational model, which allows parents to explore the connection between how they were parented and how they are parenting, is life-changing. ​Parents develop insight around unhelpful/unhealthy patterns and then replace those patterns with healthy, strength-based parenting approaches. 

Consider Tanya. 

Today, reunited with her children, Tanya carries this hope, enthusiasm, and her new-found strategies and approaches into her role as a parent and into her life in general. She keeps in touch with her Parenting Journey group facilitator and peers, sending videos of her and her children walking and laughing on the way to school and of them playing at home. Tanya is grateful for the moral and emotional support of her new Parenting Journey community. The joy, respect, and sense of belonging that Tanya felt in Parenting Journey now lives with her children and family. 

Expanding the NEST

But Tanya’s story is just one example of Parenting Journey’s impact. Through research in recent years we’ve confirmed that they’re not alone. In 2020, the American Psychological Association published Impact of a Community-Delivering Parenting Curriculum on Perceived Parenting Stress and Parent-Reported Outcomes in a Low-Income Diverse Population. Citing “a need for effective, strengths-based parenting supports for diverse parent populations,” the quasi-experimental study was conducted to “investigate whether [Parenting Journey’s] 12-week parenting program delivered in the community decreases perceived parenting stress and improves parent-reported outcomes.” In terms of method and results:

• Parents in the intervention group participated in Parenting Journey. 
• Parents who were eligible for Parenting Journey but did not enroll were included in the comparison group. 
• Participants completed the Parenting Stress Index and the Parenting Journey Survey (see study, Appendix B) at baseline and follow-up. 
• 244 parents were enrolled: 123 in the intervention group and 121 in the comparison group. 
• The majority of participants in the intervention and comparison groups were female, identified as Black or Latino, and reported an annual household income of less than $20,000. 

There are seven key domains that contribute to positive parenting practices: hope and optimism, insight, identifying personal goals, self-efficacy, self-nurturing ability, self-awareness, social networks. According to the study, 73% of parents experienced improvements in three or more domains, and 100% of parents improved in at least one area. We know that Parenting Journey works. 

We’ve also learned that the need for Parenting Journey extends well beyond any regional boundaries and our capacity to support parents as a direct service provider. In 2021, Parenting Journey concluded research that helped to shape its present strategic plan. That research was conducted by a third-party consultant and included stakeholder interviews with Parenting Journey group facilitators (at local community-based organizations), staff, faculty, consultants, and board members; interviews with content experts in the field of family support; aggregation and review of Parenting Journey’s internal systems, program data, and finances; and research on other parenting programs and training institutes.

We found that people saw Parenting Journey as a distinctive provider in the field, offering a differentiated model for high-performing practitioners. We also discovered that there was significant unmet need for our NEST approach, and that there was a strong need for organizational support from Parenting Journey. These revelations were across geographies. We heard this from stakeholders in the Northeast and in the Southeast. They also were across specialties which ranged from child welfare, foster care, and early childhood education to mental health, substance use prevention, housing, and community health.  

This has led us to where we are today: the same commitment with the added clarity that we must make Parenting Journey’s practices and approaches more widely available. We must continue to partner with parents, families, and communities to innovate, and we must help to create the environment that nurtures family and community wellbeing. To this end, in addition to our main pillar, the Anne Peretz Training Institute, our strategic way forward includes:

• Parents Partnership: direct delivery of parent programs and an incubator for new program development; 
• The Parenting Journey Network: a consortium for shared learning among practitioners, alumni, and supporters;
• The Possibility Institute: a think tank and forum for new ideas that connect policy, research, and practice.

In this new stage of impact, our mission is to fundamentally transform family and community wellbeing by centering on strengths-based, trauma-informed approaches that help families and communities thrive. We do this by developing and teaching life-changing strategies and by fostering a collaborative network of individuals and institutions that implement PJ programs, and who advocate for better opportunities for families and communities. In order to fulfill our mission, we will grow our US presence to 10 new geographies, learning from our amazing international partners in Guatemala and Burundi as we increase our global presence, and sharpen our clarity about our impact.

So, our hope, in this next stage, is to nurture relationships around the world and reach families like Tanya’s in need of help far beyond the Northeastern region of the United States. It seems only fitting that the organization must learn and grow with its implementing partners, parents, and families. 

Like parents, we want what is best for families. It’s time for our NEST to grow and expand. In many ways, this part of our journey is just the beginning.

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Kistin, C. J., Touw, S., Collins, H., Sporn, N., & Finnegan, K. E. (2020). Impact of a community-delivered parenting curriculum on perceived parenting stress and parent-reported outcomes in a low-income diverse population. Families, Systems, & Health, 38(1), 57–73. https://doi.org/10.1037/fsh0000460

To learn more about Parenting Journey, visit us online at parentingjourney.org/. We also encourage you to read Amy Biancolli’s review of Anne Peretz’s book, Opening Up.