Lessons Learned: Providing Peer Support to Culturally Diverse Families of Children with Disabilities or Special Health Care Needs

2018

Dana Yarbrough
[email protected]
804-828-0352

Effective peer support is important to the promotion of well-being in parents of children with disabilities or special health care needs, who may suffer from higher levels of stress due to increased caretaking burden and difficulty navigating systems of care. Parents from culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) communities may bear the effects of additional stressors, such as economic instability, language barriers, limited access to disability-related information, the aftereffects of trauma, and lack of social support. Unfortunately, when CLD families of children with disabilities reach out, the support they receive may not be culturally sensitive or culturally appropriate. In this Practice Update we describe Parent to Parent (P2P), a peer support program for parents of children with disabilities, discuss barriers to serving families from diverse communities, and detail promising that have improved their ability to provide culturally agile support.

Cultural Brokering, Cultural Diversity, Cultural Competency, Family Support, Parent to Parent

Peer-reviewed publications in scholarly journals Published/In Press

Consumers/Families, Professionals

https://doi.org/10.1093/sw/swy019

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