Protect and Connect: A Child Maltreatment Prevention Program

Challenges

• Childhood trauma has been shown to have a detrimental effect on individuals throughout their entire lives, resulting in an estimated annual economic burden of $89,123 and a lifetime economic burden of $2.5 million per affected individual.
• Childhood trauma can result from multiple experiences, including child maltreatment, domestic violence, and unhealthy family relationships.
• Children who experience significant adversities without proper support are at substantial risk of not reaching their full potential, either personally or as members of society.

Extension Response

The MSU Extension Trauma-Informed Parenting and Professional Strategies (TIPPS) Protect and Connect program aims to prevent child maltreatment, help children and families connect, and enhance care practices among parents and professionals working with children and families.

• The Protect and Connect program (P&C) is a proven approach that uses a subscription-box model to provide free, research-based parenting resources to families. In 2024, 586 Mississippi families received the toolkit. While we conservatively estimate the impact as one child per family, the majority of participating families have multiple children.
• P&C contains five toolkits focused on facilitating optimal child development, positive guidance strategies, emotion regulation/parental self-care, family resources, and healthy family communication.
• A variety of strategies are used to present parenting education, promote community engagement, and recruit for the program. Anyone caring for a child in the state of Mississippi is eligible to participate.
• Professional caseworkers interact with families to connect them with community resources or answer specific parenting-related questions.
• While 45% of participating parents earned $35,000 or less, the majority of parents were college educated.

Economic Impacts

• Since multiple programs are needed to address the adversities of child trauma victims, we estimate that parental participation in the P&C program addresses 25% of adversities.
• In 2024, we estimate that the annual savings of economic burden to affected child trauma victims attributable to the P&C program is $13.1 million.
• These savings to families, when spent at a rate proportionate to household income level, could support 77 jobs earning $3.4 million in labor income, $7.2 million in value-added, and $12.5 million in total output for the local region.
• These savings could generate increases of $304,008 in local taxes, $603,062 in state taxes, and $820,504 in federal taxes.

M2480-25 (10-25)

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