Identifying Barriers to Parents Building “a Village of Support” for Children

Editor’s Note: Several members of the NMRC Research Board participated in the 2017 National Mentoring Summit this past February, leading a research track that featured OJJDP-funded research and totaled 13 workshops across the multi-day event. We asked several Research Board members to share their key insights from the event based on a workshop they lead, an innovation they learned about, or a conversation they had with an attendee that made them think about the mentoring field in a new light. We will run several of these stories over the months of March and April in the NMRC blog to bring the Summit to life for those who could not attend.

In light of the increasing and widening social class divide present in the early 21^st century, American families and their children are facing more challenges than ever before. Academic underachievement, a school-to-prison pipeline, and the opioid epidemic are just a few examples. As I led workshops, attended workshops, and connected with like-minded folks at the 2017 National Mentoring Summit, I was reminded of the opportunity we have in mentoring to create chances for connection, positive youth development, upward mobility, and quality of life. I was, however, also reminded that disparities in accessing mentoring relationships exist. As Robert Putnam describes in his book Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, children from disadvantaged families are two to three times less likely to reach adulthood having had a positive relationship with a non-parental adult than children from more affluent families. We have a grand challenge ahead of us. How can we help ensure that all children experience a quality mentoring relationship, and hopefully more than one?

Dr. Tim Cavell, of the University of Arkansas, and I have started a line of research that seeks to capitalize on parents’ capacities to foster mentoring relationships for their children and to reduce the chance of children reaching adulthood without supportive mentors. Our research design involves collected survey data and facilitating focus groups of parents, during which we explore their feelings about involving other adults in their children’s lives to increase support and nurture mentoring relationships.

In reflecting on my own parenting (to which I am a whole 8 months in!), I am already feeling the pressure to be everything and everyone to my child. “Mommy guilt” is real. Despite the high value I place on mentoring and building supportive networks for my family and me, I still fight the feeling of being too proud or too worried to let others really share in my struggles, much less ask them for help. Sure, you can meet me between the hours of 7am and 9am on a Saturday, when my son is most likely to be happy and content, but please don’t drop by unexpectedly when we’re struggling to sleep longer than 45 minutes at a time.

My feelings were echoed during a focus group I facilitated last week. The mother of a middle school child who often behaves impulsively shared how hard it is to allow other adults (including his formal mentor) to spend significant time with him, out of fear that his behavior would reflect negatively on her competence as a parent.

We recently completed our sixth parent focus group, and pride is coming out as one common barrier to building a village of support. Parents also describe feeling scared, feeling like a burden, feeling unsure how to build these relationships, and feeling like no one is available. So, if we’re to empower parents (myself included), to facilitate mentoring relationships throughout childhood, which, by the way, has direct benefits to parents as well, how can we overcome these barriers? And how might mentors use this information to work more effectively with parents and to facilitate greater numbers of adults whom children can access?

In communities and families where the potential for supportive adult relationships are abundant, the path seems clearer. For parents like me, it’s mostly an internal process – that is, establishing greater confidence as a mom, taking some risks to ask for help, and reminding myself of what I know and tell other parents nearly every day – that these relationships really do matter. But when potential mentors are less available, what do parents do? And what do parents do when formal mentors aren’t available or become inaccessible? The answers to these questions are part of what we’re hoping to learn from our study. Stay tuned.