A home visiting program in South Louisiana supporting families with fussy infants

This presentation will discuss the implementation of an innovative promising-practice home-visiting program in the Gulf Coast Region. Fussy Baby Network® (FBN), a national program headquartered at Erikson Institute in Chicago, Illinois, has developed a model to support families experiencing stress related to the birth of a new baby. Unfortunately, access to services to help parents respond to their newborns is diminished in many disaster exposed communities, such as the Gulf Coast communities, compounding parental distress. In the absence of support services parents of fussy babies may continue to struggle during the first year of life and are at-risk for a decreased quality of life and more severely, child abuse We have found the FBN model to be a powerful tool that allows us to support a diverse set of parents struggling with their infant's fussiness or challenging behavior (i.e. eating, sleeping, or crying). When parents contact our program they rate their stress level, on average, to be 4.05 on a scale of 1 to 5. Sixty percent of the infants served to date have had a medical diagnosis at birth or currently (e.g., reflux, NICU) and 23% of infants were born premature. Thirty-three percent of families were of minority status and 21% were single parents. The household income for 17% of the families served was less than 25 thousand dollars yet 47% were above 75 thousand dollars. Even with this diversity by the time families completed our program their average stress score decreased to 2.14.