Online Program

295670
Building Stronger Families to Prevent Child Maltreatment


Tuesday, November 5, 2013 : 12:50 p.m. - 1:10 p.m.

Robert Sege, MD, PhD, Pediatrics, Boston Medical Center, Boston, MA
In the past, the prevention of child maltreatment centered on identifying children who had been abused, protecting them, and punishing the perpetrators. Our current understanding finds that Child maltreatment prevention presents a very complex and difficult set of challenges; maltreatment itself has enormous lifelong health consequences for individuals and fiscal consequences for the nation. Upstream factors represent a balance between risk and promotion factors. The prevention of child maltreatment requires an understanding of individual, community, and social-ecological levels of intervention. This new approach, exemplified by the new Essentials of Childhood framework, results in a changed perspective in prevention, recognizing that we are all part of the same community, face the same sets of challenges, and have similar needs in order to support ourselves, our families and our communities. This approach underlines current prevention work in multiple sectors: Child welfare agencies implement the Strengthening Families framework, pediatricians utilize Bright Futures, and there is increasing public support for high quality early childhood education. The implications of this new perspective include thinking explicitly about aligning the goals, messages and measures of early childhood support including healthcare, early intervention, and early childhood education to maximize collective impact.

Learning Areas:

Implementation of health education strategies, interventions and programs
Systems thinking models (conceptual and theoretical models), applications related to public health

Learning Objectives:
Explain the overall burden of child maltreatment, including lifelong health and fiscal consequences Apply complex systems theory to evaluate and understand maltreatment prevention programs Identify resources to support specific resilience factors that are available through the CDC’s Essentials for Childhood framework.

Keyword(s): Child Abuse, Violence Prevention

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: I am a practicing pediatrician, Chief of the Division of Child and Family Advocacy and Professor of pediatrics at Boston University, a member of the American Academy of Pediatric Committee of Child Abuse and Neglect and the CDC Knowledge to Action Think Tank on child maltreatment prevention. I received the AAP’s 2008 Fellow Achievement Award for my work on youth violence prevention. I’m also a PI on two federal grants for child maltreatment prevention.
Any relevant financial relationships? No

I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.