PCANY Prevention Network Partner of the Month: Child Find of America

Child Find of America’s Telephone Services for NY Dads and Moms Parenting Apart
PARENT HELP…1-800-716-3468

Child Find’s PARENT HELP program, which has been up and running since May 2006, is  funded by a five year Healthy Family – Responsible Fatherhood demonstration grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Family Assistance. PARENT HELP’s telephone- based interventions focus on improving poor relationships between separated parents….and preventing parental abduction.
Too often those poor relationships lead to denied or restricted visitation which limits the emotional support a non-custodial parent can provide. Poor parental relationships also lead to failure to provide financial support, battles over custody, inappropriate use of children as message carriers, spies, or confidants, and campaigns to alienate a child’s affection for the other parent.
At the extreme, parents abduct their children. Most abducted children live the life of a fugitive. During life on the run, these youngsters suffer emotional turmoil, inadequate schooling, unstable lifestyles, poor medical treatment, homelessness, and neglect. They have been ripped away from their families, friends, pets, and neighborhoods. In some cases, a parent says the left behind parent is dead, or doesn’t love or want them anymore. In other cases, boys are made to look like girls and girls like boys.     In 2006, there were 122 reported cases of parental child abduction in New York State. More than 263,000 children are parentally abducted nationwide each year. From our experience we know that many other cases of parental abduction and denied visitation are not reported to authorities because families are often hesitant to become involved with police on such issues, and most often do not know that parental abduction and denied visitation are crimes.

All of these impacts resulting from poor parental relationships are abusive to a child. The PARENT HELP goal is to prevent or alleviate them.
Many parenting programs, especially those designed for fathers, have empty seats. Agencies are struggling to engage estranged parents.  Courts can mandate parenting classes for divorcing parents, but many parents have never married. Their separation doesn’t bring them into the court system. Some never shared a household. Most classes were designed for middle class, divorcing parents. They don’t address the situations unwed, low-income parents face.
Law enforcement deals with denied visitation or abduction as a crime against the rights of the custodial parent not against the children, or doesn’t deal with them at all. They can never act until a crime has been committed. Our goal should be prevention.
PARENT HELP will first be tested in New York State. PARENT HELP was designed in partnership with New York State’s Child Support Enforcement (CSE) which currently receives over 80,000 phone calls per month from parents; hundreds of them are from parents with issues other than, or in addition to, child support -- denied visitation, custody battles, and parental disputes. They are calling looking for help. While CSE is not mandated or staffed to address those other issues, NYS CSE Deputy Commissioner Scott Cade recognized that getting assistance to these parents could both improve parenting and increase compliance with child support orders. CSE will refer those callers they can’t assist to Child Find.  Child Find staff can then engage both parents, and provide a range of telephone-based services including information, education, and referral, triage for crises, advocacy and support in negotiating the court system, counseling and conflict resolution.
Over the past 25 years, Child Find has earned a fine reputation for successfully providing these services nationally and internationally when a parent contacts us concerned about abduction or the threat of abduction.
The PARENT HELP goal is to promote responsible parenting by:
•    Increasing the ability of estranged parents to manage their relationship with neutral or positive impact on their children;
•    Decreasing the child abuse of denied visitation and parental abduction;
•    Establishing and increasing compliance with co-parenting plans, support orders, and visitation schedules;
•    Increasing parental knowledge of the developmental stages of childhood and a father’s role in healthy development; 
•    Developing a model that Child Find can reproduce with support enforcement offices in forty-nine additional states.

As of this writing, Parent Help has received over 1200 calls and has opened more than 325 cases. Most parent clients are fathers who are calling from Erie and Onondaga Counties and NYC where we have referral mechanisms in place through child support enforcement, as well as family courts and fatherhood employment training programs. Parent Help television ads have aired in the Hudson Valley, and print ads have appeared in a few publications in Westchester and NYC. In upcoming months, Parent Help will be rolled out in the Capital District and on Long Island. But the program now accepts callers from anywhere, so if you have a client who might benefit please suggest they call Parent Help at  1-800-716-3468. Parent Help info packs with posters and brochures are available for Prevent Child Abuse New York partners by calling the same number.

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