Prevention Services

What is the Prevention Services All About?

Prevention Services at Child and Family Charities assist youth and their families through education and support. Each program is designed to help issues with attendance and engagement in school, substance misuse, and risky behaviors through prevention, support and counseling programs that help not only the youth, but also the entire family.

Prevention Services of Child and Family Charities include the following:

Nurturing Father’s Program

The Nurturing Father’s Program is a 13-week group-based program for developing attitudes and skills for male nurturance. The group of 8 to 16 fathers meet weekly for 2½ hours. The participants will learn how to create safe, loving, stable, and nurtured families. They will demonstrate positive discipline tools, effective communication techniques, strengthen relationships, learn conflict resolution and problem-solving skills, and how to achieve cooperation and teamwork in family life.

Teen Accountability Program

Teen Accountability Program is helping youth who are charged with a first-time offense or a school code of conduct violation gain valuable understanding from their wrong-doing. This unique experience provides the youth and their family to take accountability for their action and repair harm, and prevent a repeat offense. The Accountability Hearings also offer an opportunity for high school teens to participate as appear jury and learn about restorative justice practices.

T.E.A.M. Attendance - Student Engagement & Retention

This program works to educate youth and their families on school and state attendance policies. An attendance plan is created with the family to identify risk factors that contribute to poor attendance. The youth and family work with prevention staff to improve overall attendance and engagement in school.

Strenthening Families Program 7-17 Model

Strengthening Families provides the perfect blend of parent and youth skills training to create happy family relationships and emotionally resilient, well-balanced children. This program emphasizes the nurturing parenting skills of bonding, setting boundaries, and monitoring to keep their kids safe from substance misuse, and trained them in refusal skills.

Prevention Screening and Referral to Services

The MAYSI-2 (Massachusetts Youth Screening Instrument) a prevention screening tool is used to screen youth ages 10-17 for any concerns with alcohol or drug use, any feelings of anger, irritability, depression, anxiety, somatic complaints, suicidal ideation, thought disturbances, and/or traumatic experiences. This is a self-report inventory of 52 questions. Upon completion of this screening tool a student may be referred for a full assessment to determine the need for further intervention or treatment needs.