Children's Relief Nursery

Early Intervention is Key to Family Success
Children's Relief Nursery's program is based on the nationally successful Relief Nursery model, providing intensive child and family interventions to prevent child abuse and provide support and encouragement to parents with challenging life circumstances. The model includes center-based therapeutic classes and respite childcare, early parent education, support for positive and nurturing parent / child interactions and regular home visits. Voluntary parent participation, combined with individualized goals, have the most positive result. Emphasis on the parent-child relationship is the key to success.
The earlier in a child's life that intervention is started, the more effective it is because providing safe and secure nurturing is the key to learning and social-emotional development. When parents and caregivers show responsive early care, critical bonding occurs and babies thrive. Responsive care giving means meeting the child's needs for focused attention, understanding cues and warm touches, as well as basic physical needs. Parents in our program learn that positive interactions with their child greatly affects his or her later capacity for compassion, self regulation, control over emotions, learning and cooperative behavior. Quality care and secure attachments are the building blocks for healthy brain development that promotes each child aspiring to their full potential.
Our program (Spanish & English)
Mental Health Intake & Assessment: Mental Health Clinicians provide assessments for clients, consult with classroom staff on child social-emotional health and development, and provide child/family therapy and parent consultation. Clinicians utilize Child/Parent Psychotherapy (CPP), a relationship-based model of therapy designed to improve security of attachment relationships.
Therapeutic Classroom: Case managers and volunteers provide a safe environment for children experiencing developmental challenges to participate in supportive and therapeutic social, emotional, physical, emerging language and cognitive activities.
Parent/Infant (newborn to nine months ) & Parent/Explorer (10 to 15 months) Classrooms: Parents and their babies meet in small groups to learn new skills, build and enhance the parent/child relationship, share social support and reduce social isolation. The parent infant class can include pregnant women in their third trimester.
Home Visits: Case managers regularly visit families in their homes to work on identified goals. Focusing on the child / parent relationship and the child's development, they provide supportive encouragement for positive and nurturing child/parent interactions. Families are given information and referrals to community resources and case managers communicate with families regularly to help create and support a stable, safe and secure household.
Respite Care: Parents needing time to take care of personal or family matters, or who are at risk of being overwhelmed and unable to positively parent their children, can voluntarily place their child in emergency childcare for several hours to a full day per week.
Family Connection: Weekly mentoring groups teach parents skills to create healthier interactions with their children. We use the evidence-based curriculum, "Make Parenting a Pleasure," which provides tools for reducing stress and teaches self-care, stress/anger management, communication, positive discipline and child development.
Last fiscal year, we served 211 children from 159 families.
Intake data reflects that most of our families are physically and socially isolated. They face multiple risk factors for child abuse and neglect, which include unemployment, inadequate housing, depression, mental illness, parental history of abuse as a child, drug/alcohol abuse, domestic violence... nearly all live below the federal poverty level.