Inwood House

SCHOOL AND COMMUNITY BASED TEEN PREGNANCY PREVENTION PROGRAMS

Atlantic County Teen Choice is part of a comprehensive effort the County has established to address the serious health risks of area youth and represents a unique collaboration between Inwood House, the Atlantic County Government, local public schools, the County’s Health Collaborative and parents. Atlantic County Teen Choice serves more than 800 urban, rural and suburban youth in four schools annually.

Our new, state-of-the-art Family Learning Center reopened in Spring of 2009 and is the only facility of its kind in the country. The Family Learning Center has the capacity to provide comprehensive residential care for up to 32 pregnant teens at a time who are homeless or in foster care and will provide enhanced learning opportunities for the entire family. Education and good health will be the cornerstones of family life and young parents will learn to:

Complete high school in a timely manner and access post-secondary education
Increase their employability and life-skills and prepare for career success
Form positive peer networks and family connections
Understand their roles as their children’s primary educators
Become computer fluent and promote computer literacy in their children
Promote family bonding and communication
Understand their babies’ cues and prevent child abuse and neglect
Create a healthy lifestyle for themselves and their families, based on preventive healthcare
Fulfill their role as advocates for themselves, their families, and their communities

Residential Care
Inwood House’s Residences are a haven for pregnant teens in foster care or who are homeless and have nowhere else to turn. At Inwood House, they are provided with a safe home, nutritious meals, counseling, prenatal care at New York Presbyterian Hospital, and mentoring and assistance in completing their education. Our staff of youth development counselors, social workers, nurse, psychologist, and education specialist provides a structured, supportive environment where good health and learning are associated with responsible behavior and success in life. Classes in parenting and independent living skills, job readiness and career development, stress-reduction, maternal and child health, nutrition, fitness and computer-based family literacy help prepare them to be nurturing parents and self-sufficient adults, ready to reconnect with their communities.

The Mother/Child Foster Family Care program, pioneered in 1968, places teenage mothers and their babies in foster homes where both benefit from a safe, healthy family environment and the young mother has the opportunity to nurture her baby while she continues her education and prepares for a career. The support and stability of a foster home can make a critical difference in helping a teen mother develop a strong emotional bond with her child, become a responsible parent, and achieve independence.

In 2002, Inwood House opened its first Mother/Child Foster Care Small Group Home for three new mothers and their infants in Jamaica Estates, Queens. With 24-hour care and supervision, the young mothers benefit from adult guidance and peer support, pursue school and work opportunities, and learn how to be independent in the context of a safe, structured environment.

When our young mothers leave our care, the Inwood House Partners in Parenting program provides them with a strong, stable support network of transition groups, educational and vocational counseling, independent living skills training, family planning, and parenting classes. Scholarship funds and Family Day Care help ensure that our teen mothers continue their schooling or career training.

The Inwood House community-based Bronx Teen Family Services outreach program provides parenting classes, family literacy workshops, and family day care services to pregnant and parenting teens.

Fathers Count helps our fathers take on their share of parental responsibilities and serve as positive role models for their children. They also learn the importance of having a close, life-long relationship with their child. The Fathers Count program provides parenting and family planning classes, educational and vocational referral and placement, recreational activities, counseling, a safe supportive atmosphere, and positive peer influence.

Family UniverCITY is a family literacy initiative that promotes parent-child connectedness, child-school readiness, and parent employability. The workshops were designed by FUTUREKIDS and use an interactive group model to increase youth engagement and computer literacy.

The Financial Literacy Empowerment and Education Initiative was designed to encourage our young mothers’ health, education, employment, and parenting success. The goal of the project is to equip our young mothers with the skills that they need to become economically self-sufficient and to create cycles of success for themselves and their families. The Initiative provides financial education and empowerment for the young women and their children, as well as training and professional development for the agency staff to ensure program sustainability.

The SPIN Video Home Training Program provides opportunities for parent-child bonding to reinforce positive parenting skills and prevent child abuse and neglect. This program serves approximately 25 teen parents and their children annually. This innovative program combines video technology with one-to-one home-based instruction to promote nurturing and positive parent-child and family interactions. SPIN Video Home Training offers a practiced, systematic, and theoretically sound way of teaching and practicing using a strengths-based approach in intervention. Additionally, the program: re-establishes the young parents’ sense of their own capacity to be “good” parents; eliminates the blaming that often emphasizes failures, undermines motivation and leads to hopelessness; increases hopefulness and motivation; and provides a concrete and observable vehicle for identifying skills, growth and change.