Childhood Intervention Initiative

The Childhood Intervention Initiative:

Dr. Molly Palmer and friends

This is a project long supported and now renamed as “The J. Seward Johnson, Sr. Childhood Intervention Initiative”. It is a collaborative effort involving The Princeton Nursery School and The Princeton Regional School System. It began in 1997.

Goal:

To help at-risk children from low-income families with academic or behavioral problems by intervening when problems are small so as to prevent them from becoming larger.

Problems Treated:

Services Provided:

• Psychological Testing
• Individual Therapy
• Family Therapy
• Medication

Outcome Measurements:

Each year, our psychologists administer outcome measurements for parents and teachers to assess the improvement of those students tested. The focus is twofold:

Academically: impulse control, mood, work habits, concentration, etc.

Behaviorally: relationships with teachers, parents, classmates, siblings and friends.

DEGREE OF IMPROVEMENT YEAR IMPROVEMENT     2002-2003 77.0% 2003-2004 82.3% 2004-2005 88.5% 2005-2006 92.5% 2006-2007 88.0% 2007-2008 91.5% 2008-2009 91.0% 2009-2010 90.5%

Therapeutic Infant and Parenting Skills

The Therapeutic Infant Parenting Skills Project (TIPS) is another outreach of Trinity Counseling Service. Through our work over the past years with nursery school and elementary school children, we have observed that many of the behavioral and emotional obstacles these children face are related to factors that occurred during pregnancy or infancy.

Through the TIPS project, our knowledgeable child psychologists establish trust, share knowledge, buttress self confidence, and provide emotional support to young girls and their infants. Ongoing contact facilitates the young mother’s efforts and provides for regular contact between her, her infant and our child psychologist. To best meet the needs of the mother and infant, services are frequently provided in the infant’s home. Here, we help the parent through the various stages of infancy, generally over a 2-3 year period, providing therapeutic interventions and clinically based coaching at crucial developmental stages – pre-natal, immediately after birth and through infancy. We recognize the importance of the mother’s (or parent’s) family or support system, and we include them as an integral part of our therapeutic strategies

Education and support better equips mothers to meet the needs of their infants and this in turn leads to a more successful nursery school experience. Because success in early education frequently correlates with success in middle school and high school, the impact of this project is on-going.