Children & Families First (CFF) awarded grant
Children & Families First (CFF) is awarded a $27,000 grant for their Nurturing Parenting & their Infants, Toddlers and Preschoolers Program.
CFF began helping families in greater Wilmington in 1884, serving 1,000 by
caring for orphaned children, feeding families, and operating a lumber yard to provide jobs.
The organization serves vulnerable, under-served infants, children, teens, and their caregivers who
experience a wide variety of significant challenges. These clients are three times more likely than the general
population to have childhood history of significant trauma – which, if left unaddressed, puts them at
significant risk of an array of diminished health, well-being, and self-sufficiency outcomes, including:
cognitive and emotional challenges, lower academic and professional achievement, troubled relationships,
and substance abuse, food and housing insecurity, and more.
The grant will be used to implement an intensive parenting training intervention for low-income pregnant and new mothers who are
recovering from serious addiction, and whose deficits in parenting skills put their children at risk of neglect
and abuse. Nurturing Parenting & their Infants, Toddlers, & Preschoolers (NPITP) is a skills-based familycentered
trauma-informed program designed to build effective, nurturing parenting skills as an alternative to
abusive and neglectful child-rearing practices. The Nurturing Parenting Program is proven to increase
parenting skills, self-worth, empathy, and bonding among a population with significant challenges, toward
improving stability, resiliency, and self-sufficiency for themselves and their children. Long term benefits also
include: reducing recidivism in families receiving social services, lowering multi-parent teenage pregnancy
rate, reducing juvenile delinquency and alcohol abuse, and stopping the intergenerational cycle of child
abuse. The intervention addresses a critical unmet need, and builds on CFF’s established, successful
parenting skills programs and nurse home visiting programs for at-risk pregnant women, new mothers, and
their young children.