Building On Family Strengths Project

The four year research project, Building on Family Strengths (BFS), evaluated the effectiveness of a class for parents of children with special health care needs on managing their child's chronic condition in everyday life.

Parents of children between ages 2 - 11 years with at least one chronic condition attended a two hour session once a week for 7 weeks. Each session was co-facilitated by a parent of a child with special needs and a health care professional. Co-facilitators provided a short introduction to each session's topic. Parents were then asked to discuss challenges they faced related to the topic and strategies they used to meet the challenges. Topics at the sessions included emotions, the child's chronic illness, siblings, relationships, parenting, dealing with large systems, and finding meaning in the experience.

Although the children of these parents had different chronic conditions and the seriousness of the conditions varied, parents discovered they had many challenges in common. The parents learned from each other about strategies they used to make things work for them in their everyday life. During the sessions, co-facilitators also provided information on coping techniques. Each week parents developed an action plan for practicing a coping technique or trying out a strategy to meet one of their challenges.

BFS was a joint project of the Center for Children with Special Needs at Seattle Children's and the University of Washington's Department of Family and Child Nursing and Center for Human Development and Disability, in Seattle, Washington. Funding for the project was awarded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality in the United States Department of Health and Human Services (grant # #R01 HSO13384; Principal Investigator, Gail Kieckhefer, PhD, APRN; October 2003 - September 2008). Human subject approval was granted through Seattle Children's Institutional Review Board. Parents were involved in development of the grant proposal, development of the class curriculum, co-facilitation of sessions for each class, development of published articles and What Helps You.

Twelve groups of parents (83 individual parents) from Western Washington took Building on Family Strengths classes and all class notes were recorded. Major themes of challenges and strategies were analyzed using qualitative data analysis software, QSR N6. The What Helps You information was condensed from class notes and edited to protect the privacy of parent participants and for ease of understanding.