The Role of "Parent Advocates," "Parent Coaches and Mentors," and/or "Family Parters"

Many parents and families, and other mental health consumers have found that getting high quality mental health care for a child or a family member is very difficult.  Many parents and families find not only many barriers to care, but misdirection, bad advice, and lack of information.  Increasingly, parents, other consumers, and parent and family advocates have learned that the very best persons able to offer them sound advice -- i.e., where to go, what service to use, which provider to see, etc., is best known by other expert parents...parents who have become advocates to other parents who are new to the system, so that new parents will not struggle with the common experience that too many parents are traumatized by -- 5-10 years of delay, confusion, and misdirection, before they finally become experts through hard-won experience about their local mental health system, and "how to make the system work" for the child with ADHD, depression, bipolar disorder, autism, or other severe mental health disorders. If an analogous situation involved food and groceries, all of us would find that we were still roaming about like hunter-gatherers, wondering where good food sources, roots and berries, and edible plants and animals could be found.  Word of mouth from trusted members of the tribe and from our family members would be what we would have to rely on.  Thus, as many senior policy makers, researchers, and the US Surgeon General have observed, the child mental health system is "broken", if indeed it was ever intact.

The Need For Parent Activation (aka "Parent Empowerment")

A parent who confused and bewildered about their child most often does not know where to turn: some may ask a trusted teacher for a referral, i.e., "Do you know a good doctor?", while others may turn to relatives, or ask their child's primary care doctor.  Many parents are frustrated when they call their insurance companies' "preferred provider" list, only to find numbers that are no longer in service, or doctors who say they no longer work with that insurance company.  Consider instead the benefits to a novice parent seeking for a local mental health expert of a "parent advocate," "parent coach or mentor," or "family partner": this person works within the mental health system, has been trained about local resource and their availability, is experienced both personally (through their own child) and professionally (through an intensive parent empowerment training program and subsequent official certification or credential) with experience and knowledge about what an IEP is and how it differs from a 504 Plan, how and where one obtains local services for a child, and how challenges an insurance company's determination not to pay for a given procedure or disorder/problem.

Through a 10 year program of research, the REACH Institute has developed as just such a program, its "Parent Empowerment Training Program", or PEP for short.  In this year-long course, experienced parents "who have been there, seen it, and done it" complete a week-long program with other expert parents, learning about how to become a professional parent advocate, and how to serve as a parent mentor, coach, and partner to new parents just beginning this long journey.  REACH has developed such parent empowerment-parent activation training programs, not just for the mental health system, but also for the child welfare system, the juvenile justice system, and the school system.  In each of these programs, experienced parents become expert parent advocates as they formally acquire new knowledge and skills to fill in any gaps in their experience.   These parent empowerment training programs usually entail 3-5 days of hands-on, intensive training, skills practice exercises, role plays, didactic lectures, and small group exercises, all taught by a very senior and experienced parent advocate and a mental health professional, followed by one year of twice monthly group conference calls, where new parent advocates get help, guidance, and peer supervision in how to better help the new parents they are working with.  If your want to learn more about how you can obtain training for prospective parent mentors, coaches, and partners in your setting, region, or agency, contact Lisa Hunter Romanelli, PhD, REACH's Executive Director on our "About Us" link.  Trainings are available not only for parents to become parent advocates, but also for clinicians and agency directors, so that they and their colleagues can be prepared to take full advantage of this vital, new, and urgently needed expert workforce that is increasingly available in many states trying to "fix" our broken child mental health system.