Calling All Dads! Evaluation of APAs ACT Program: Engaging Fathers to Prevent Adverse Childhood Experiences

Overview

The goal of this observational study is to assess the American Psychological Association's ACT Raising Safe Kids program with male caregivers. The main question\[s\] it aims to answer are: • Will male caregivers in the ACT Raising Safe Kids program report lower child maltreatment, rates of interpersonal violence, and youth aggression. • Does the ACT RSK program have a positive return on investment and will children and caregivers in the ACT RSK condition have a higher quality adjusted life years. Participants will complete four surveys over time and attend the 9-week ACT Raising Safe Kids program. Researchers will compare survey responses from male caregivers taking the ACT Raising Safe Kids classes to male caregivers not taking ACT Raising Safe Kids classes to see if there are changes in anger regulation, family conflict, parent-child conflict, and relationship satisfaction.

The overall goal of the proposed 3-year project is to determine the efficacy and cost-benefit of ACT Raising Safe Kids, an evidence-based child maltreatment (CM) prevention program to prevent multiple forms of violence by male caregivers and their children. The program, ACT Raising Safe Kids (ACT), was developed by the American Psychological Association and identified in the Center for Disease Control \& Prevention's technical package, Preventing Child Abuse \& Neglect, as a promising strategy to prevent child maltreatment. Evidence suggests the ACT program reduces coercive, harsh, and physically aggressive parenting practices; increases positive, nurturing parenting practices; and reduces children's externalizing, aggressive, bullying behavior. While suggesting the efficacy of ACT in reducing child maltreatment, existing program evaluations have been limited by the near complete absence of male caregivers in the evaluations. This is a critical gap as male caregivers are perpetrators in nearly 50% of substantiated child maltreatment cases and are more likely to engage in harsh discipline and corporal punishment that could cause injury. The true innovation of the work lies in examining the potential of ACT to additionally prevent intimate partner violence (IPV) perpetration by male caregivers and subsequent youth violence (YV) by their children. To date, no evaluation of ACT has examined the combined prevention effects on CM, IPV, and YV among men or women.