Parenting Interventions: TBRI with Court-Involved Families

Challenges

• Childhood trauma is known to have a harmful effect on children throughout their entire lives, resulting in an estimated lifetime economic burden of $2.5 million per affected individual.
• Childhood adversity (e.g., having an incarcerated parent) can leave an imprint on the brain and body, especially when the experiences include relational traumas such as maltreatment, abuse, neglect, violence, and/or family dysfunction (e.g., substance abuse; removal of the child from the home).
• Without significant intervention, these children are at substantial risk of not reaching their full potential, both personally and as members of society.

Extension Response

The intervention side of the MSU Extension Trauma-Informed Parenting and Professional Strategies (TIPPS) program uses Trust-Based Relational Intervention (TBRI®) to help caregivers create safe, stable, nurturing relationships and environments for children and provide healing in trauma-exposed families.

• TBRI consists of three principles—connecting, empowering, and correcting—that can be used in a variety of settings with all children, but they are particularly healing for children with difficult backgrounds.
• This approach helps caregivers understand what should have happened in the child’s early development so they can guide the child back to a natural developmental trajectory.
• TIPPS partnered with the Lowndes and Oktibbeha County youth courts and Child Protective Services to recruit parents. To date, 108 court-involved parents or foster parents have successfully completed six hours of TBRI training. While we conservatively estimate the impact as one child per family, the majority of participating families have multiple children.

Economic Impacts

• This approach’s efficacy is demonstrated by 98.6% of participants indicating that they would recommend the training to other caregivers.
• Since multiple programs are needed to address the needs of child trauma victims, we estimate that parental participation in the TIPPS Intervention Program addresses 25% of adversities.
• In 2024, we estimate the annual savings of economic burden to affected child trauma victims attributable to the TIPPS Intervention program is $2.4 million.
• These savings to families, when spent at a rate proportionate to household income level, could support 14 jobs earning $617,267 in labor income, $1.3 million in value-added, and $2.3 million in total output.
• These savings could generate increases of $56,068 in local taxes, $111,222 in state taxes, and $151,327 in federal taxes.

M2480-26 (10-25)

Lori Elmore-Staton, PhD, Professor, Human Sciences, and Director, TIPPS