P2B106: Qualitative Feedback from a Nonviolence Parenting Program Among Refugee Families at the Mexico-us Border

Background: At the US-Mexico border, up to 700,000 new refugees arrive per year. Most refugees flee from extreme violence and poverty conditions. Parents report high rates of stress, sadness, and anxiety. Up to half of the refugees are under 18 and are especially vulnerable Parenting programs have been shown to decrease child maladjustment, but evidence is lacking in refugee settings in Mexico.

Methods: PILAglobal is a 501(c)(3t) that provides free education to refugee children to spark curiosity, creativity and critical thinking. At the Tijuana PILA site, a parenting program was piloted using the “Raising Children with Nonviolence” curriculum (Beaglehole, 2019). Four 1.5h classes delivered twice a month by an educator with one early childhood educator support to over 1,000 caregivers. Anonymous, aggregate nationality and child gender data from 494 participants were summarized using STATA 12.0. Qualitative anonymous parental feedback were recorded from 19 guardians. A thematic analysis was conducted using NVIVO 12.0 using a grounded theory approach.

Results: Majority of the refugee children whose parents participated came from Mexico (48%), Honduras (31%), Mexico (25.7%), followed by Haiti (9%) and El Salvador (8%). The mean age of these children was 7.58 (SD 2.81) years-old and gender was evenly distributed (52% female, 48% male). From the 19 qualitative interviews, three recurrent themes emerged: 1) high level of parental stress and boredom prior to intervention 2) improved parent-child interactions after the intervention; 3) sharing learning experiences with other parents was fun and gave hope.

Conclusion: A low-cost, nonviolence parenting program was feasible and beneficial among refugee parents in Tijuana, Mexico and has the potential for scale-up. Objective measures, implementation research and dissemination could help maximize the impact.