Reducing Stress Experienced by Young Parents

High stress levels are associated with dysfunctional parenting behavior and negative interactions between parents and their child. Teenage parents, in particular, face high levels of stress as they try to cope with their new role. FAST Babies is a multi-family group prevention program for young parents and their infants (0-3) specifically designed to build protective and reduce risk factors in order to provide children of young mothers with the opportunity to reach their full potential. The program involves the infant, the young parents, as well as the grandmother, and program activities stress experiential learning, and practice taking responsibility for the baby through repeated communication rehearsals. The FAST Babies evaluation consists of a pre- and post-test completed by the young mothers. The questionnaire includes a short form of the Parenting Stress Index (Abidin, 1995). Following the eight week program, young mothers report significant improvements in parental distress (distress a parent is experiencing in his or her role as parent as a function of personal factors that are directly related to parenting), parent-child dysfunctional interaction (the parent's perception that the child does not meet the parent's expectations), the parent's perception of the child (behavioral characteristics of children that make them either easy or difficult to manage), and a decrease in total parenting stress.