Safe and Nurtured Recommendations
VISION: Children grow confident and resilient in safe, stable, and nurturing families, schools, and communities; parents are supported and knowledgeable about child development.
“We have to recognize that we’re going through things too as men, but then we need to recognize what we need to do for our children in that respect. My kids are really going through it right now. It’s hard, man.”
– Durham Parent
The system of people, institutions, and resources that support families’ social-emotional health in a society that does not allocate resources equitably. This system is supposed to help ensure that all children are safe and nurtured.
Learn more about the components of our family support system and the strengths, challenges, and opportunities to improve it in the report below.
13. Child and Family Social-Emotional Health, Mental Health and Resilience
Early childhood mental health, social-emotional health, and resilience are foundational to healthy development and success later in life, but cannot be addressed in a vacuum. The surrounding wellness of a family and community sets the stage for a child’s social-emotional development.
Strategies
The Recommendation: Promote Preventive and Responsive Approaches to Foster Social-Emotional, Mental Health and Resilience of Young Children and Their Families
The Strategies:
STRATEGY 13.1: Address the root causes of family stress that lead to community and domestic violence; promote utilization of and expand access to strategies that prevent community and domestic violence and promote coordinated community response.
STRATEGY 13.2: Strengthen the local ecosystem of culturally-affirming, community-rooted supports for families' social-emotional and mental health that help families respond to stress in their lives and support their children's social-emotional health.
Why this Recommendation is Important to Our Community
As children develop critical social-emotional skills and abilities to cope early in life, they are doing so within the context of family and community. Early childhood mental health, social-emotional health, and resilience are foundational to healthy development and success later in life, but cannot be addressed in a vacuum. The surrounding wellness of a family and community sets the stage for a child’s social-emotional development.
Family and community wellness is disrupted by poverty and systemic racism and the resulting substance use, home and neighborhood violence, police violence, overrepresentation of Black and Brown families in child protective service reports, food insecurity, housing insecurity, and incarceration that can follow and create stress for families and children.
Community Voices:
It’s critical to address the underlying, root causes that disrupt child and family social-emotional, mental health, and resilience. Some of the root causes of stress the families shared include:
Struggling to make ends meet:
My biggest challenge as a parent: “Cost of living,” “Finance, housing,” “Having enough resources,” “Affordable healthy food” - Durham parents
"Work at Duke and still cannot afford a decent living" - Durham parent
Losing a sense of belonging in Durham:
"Downtown Durham is starting to feel unaccessible/unfriendly to those who are not affluent and white. That's unfortunate. When I first moved here, it seemed a lot more of a melting pot. But it's becoming exclusive b/c of unattainable housing costs and a downtown scene that's no longer catered to everyone. It doesn't feel like a place for me and my family. The one bright spot is a space like Nolia (family friendly, black owned coffee shop). Nolia is representative of what I think Durham should feel like for families. Welcoming, centering diversity, kid friendly, affordable." - Durham parent
Facing interpersonal, community, and police violence:
"Just a couple of days ago, my son was playing with a nerf gun. Went outside to go check the mail and his mom lost it. We had to have a conversation about being aware about how things are perceived. We shouldn’t even have to have a conversation. Even on my property with a bright, orange nerf gun.” - Durham parent
"Currently my family and I live in Oxford Manor. 15 min of shooting at 6:30 PM in a neighborhood filled with families. People deserve a better place to live than neighborhoods that have mold, are unkept, violence. this breeds violence and negativity" - Durham parent
Experiencing racism:
“We keep so much stuff on us internally that it starts to eat us up internally with different diseases and things that are happening. Stress is real. The pressure to make sure we always have to do X, Y, and Z is tiring. It’s exhausting. Not to mention the fact that when we wake up in the morning we’re thinking I’m Black, I gotta make sure I wear this right, look like this, don’t have this facial expression, make sure I do that." - Durham parent
Facing stigma around mental health:
“We have so much pressure on us as fathers, as husbands, as brothers, as uncles...we just don’t talk about our pressure.” - Durham parent
“We’re all having to shift our understanding of manhood and what it means to be a man. There are two brothers who I talk to regularly and we talk about once a week. Like you all, I’m glad I have somebody to say I’m not ok. I’ve watched some other brothers struggling through all this but they won’t say anything because that’s what they’ve been told a man does.” - Durham parent
As a result, parents are struggling to manage their own mental health challenges.
My biggest challenge as a parent: “My postpartum depression and anxiety” - Durham parent
“Managing my own anxiety, mental health, and unresolved issues from childhood. I work on these diligently but still feel extremely anxious about the health and well-being of my child every day, and while there are lots of resources out there sometimes it's too much information and my brain feels overloaded. Sometimes it's just overwhelming and feels like no matter what, I'm doing something wrong.” - Durham parent
"Unable to go to therapy or counseling because it's not covered by my insurance" - Durham parent
"Counseling is unaffordable" - Durham parent
Parents are looking for:
"More support for parents, especially for mental health needs" - Durham parent
"More groups for parents to get social support" - Durham parent
"More support in the postpartum period up to first year checking on mom's and their babies” - Durham parent
“Affordable mental health care!!” - Durham parent
“Having access to mental health support during pregnancy” - Durham parent
Parents also want support with their young children’s social-emotional health:
“Helping daughter with her anxiety” - Durham parent
I can't pay attention to the children's mental health, when we are busy with work, we have no time to accompany the children” - Durham parent
“Something going through my mind constantly lately is having more social and emotional support for my kids” - Durham parent
“Parenting during COVID has been extremely difficult, especially dealing with the social/emotional needs of each individual in the family” - Durham parent
14. Social Services and Child Protective Services
Reimagine social services and child protective services to become more trauma-informed, anti-racist, and focused on prevention. Focusing on prevention will help us reduce harm by ensuring families have the resources they need to avoid contact with social services. It is also critical to acknowledge, address, and repair the harm that has been caused, and continues to be caused, by the child welfare system in Durham, particularly for BIPOC families.
Strategies
The Recommendation: Reimagine Social Services and Child Protective Services to Become More Trauma-Informed, Anti-Racist, and Focused on Prevention
The Draft Strategies:
STRATEGY 14.1: Expand the foundation of preventive services in Durham and identify strategies to connect families to services sooner.
STRATEGY 14.2: Embed early childhood development principles into child welfare systems and practice through training and support for individuals who work with infant-toddler cases.
STRATEGY 14.3: Promote a trauma-informed, anti-racist environment for families and staff that 1) acknowledges, mitigates, and repairs harm that has been perpetuated by child welfare systems and 2) supports wellness and anti-racism work for child welfare staff integrated into the whole department.
Why this Recommendation is Important to Our Community
The Department of Social Services and Child Protective Services are intended to exist to keep children and families safe. The ECAP targets are focused on reducing child maltreatment. North Carolina law defines three types of maltreatment: 1) abuse, 2) neglect, and 3) dependency. Factors that can contribute to child maltreatment include the presence of adults who face substance use disorders, mental illness (notably maternal depression), and domestic violence.(1) To address the root cause, we must address that all of these factors are highly correlated with poverty. Young children are at the highest risk for abuse and neglect, and the impacts of abuse and neglect on young children are particularly severe because of their impact on early brain development.
Many families have traumatic experiences with the agency—not only those whose children are being removed or who have been removed themselves as children (which are inherently traumatic), but also families accessing needed financial support. It is absolutely critical to acknowledge and repair the harm and trauma disproportionately experienced by BIPOC communities in Durham, who are more likely to have interactions with social services.
At the same time, focusing on prevention and “moving upstream” will also help to reduce harm by ensuring families have the resources they need before they ever come into contact with social services. The Family First Prevention and Services Act is an important first step toward greater investment in child maltreatment prevention, support to kin caregivers, and proper placements for children and youth needing temporary foster care. This Durham ECAP recommendation is in line with the recommendations of the National Council on Family Relations to transform child welfare by focusing on prevention, racial equity, and authentic partnership with community agencies and families.(2)
(1) https://www.nap.edu/catalog/18331/new-directions-in-child-abuse-and-neglect-research
(2) https://www.ncfr.org/policy/research-and-policy-briefs/transforming-child-welfare
Community Voices:
"A social services department that doesn't hate human life" - Durham parent
“Stop paying social workers to yell at people and just pay people. It's that simple." - Durham parent
"The narrative around CPS needs to change. Re-education for social workers on supporting families and not just causing child separation." - Durham parent
15. Trauma-Informed, Culturally Affirming Birth through 3rd Grade Classrooms
Ensure birth through 3rd grade learning environments are trauma-informed, culturally-affirming, gender-affirming, and focused on social-emotional health since traumatic experiences in early childhood can disrupt a child's learning.
Strategies
The Recommendation: Ensure birth through 3rd grade learning environments are trauma-informed, culturally affirming, gender affirming, and focused on social-emotional health
The Strategies:
STRATEGY 15.1: Create systems which support young children’s growth by focusing on the skills, processes and procedures that are needed for reducing stress (adaptive coping), increasing good decision-making, and healthy expression of emotion (effective self-regulation), with attention to trauma and resilience.
STRATEGY 15.2: Train more birth through 8 teachers and school staff to adopt practices, policies, and pedagogy that are anti-racist, gender-affirming, and culturally affirming.
STRATEGY 15.3: Increase the number of culturally responsive support staff in public schools and childcare settings.
Why this Recommendation is Important to Our Community
Traumatic experiences in early childhood can disrupt a child’s learning. Students may experience trauma from events like divorce in the family, substance abuse in the family, homelessness, domestic violence, illness in the family, poverty, racism, or incarceration in the family, for example. For some children these events may “lead to a trauma response that can lead to a cascade of social, emotional and academic difficulties that can interfere with a child’s ability to learn at school.”(1) Child care facilities, elementary schools and other early learning environments can create “trauma-informed” environments, which recognize the widespread impact of trauma and understand potential paths for recovery; recognize the signs and symptoms of trauma in students and fellow staff; and respond by fully integrating knowledge about trauma into policies, procedures, classroom practices, and seeks to actively resist re-traumatization.(2)
Children also do better when they learn in environments where their culture, gender, and other identities they hold are affirmed and celebrated. Simply, a child’s sense of belonging is central to their capacity to learn. Research shows that “institutional biases that are manifested in monocultural, monoracial assumptions and representations in books, materials, testing, and tracking for example can cause repeated and cumulative harm to children’s growth, development and academic achievement."(3)
(1) https://traumasensitiveschools.org/why/.
(2) https://ncsacw.samhsa.gov/userfiles/files/SAMHSA_Trauma.pdf
(3) https://www.pearsonhighered.com/assets/samplechapter/0/1/3/2/0132867540.pdf
Community Voices
“A lot of lip service to supporting the needs of the whole child without any commitment to that. For example, we’re constantly told to provide social-emotional instruction without a curriculum for that.” - Durham Public Schools K-3 Teacher
“Many trainings on implicit bias are offered and the teacher's always ask HOW?” - Durham Public Schools K-3 Teacher
"Most important is that there always be a social worker on staff. They are not there every day all day as well as nurses." - Durham parent
“[School counselors] get pulled in all different directions. At the K2 and K3 level they come in for one class once a month. There’s not enough time for the children to get one-on-one.” - Durham Public Schools K-3 Teacher
"Some teachers blame only the African American kids and not the white kids." - Durham parent
"Teachers trained in how to talk with kids about race and bias" - Durham parent
"increased inherent bias training for teachers" - Durham parent
“Not necessarily training as much as embedding implicit bias and identity development in school/district culture so all teams (teachers, admin, etc.) are on the same page with it.” - Durham Public Schools K-3 Teacher
"Seminars for children that focus on diversity, equity, anti-racism and kindness." - Durham parent