The mission of the U.S. Air Force Family Advocacy Program is to build healthy communities through implementing programs designed for the prevention and treatment of child and spouse abuse.
The Family Advocacy Program seeks to:
- Provide primary prevention services to all Air Force personnel.
- Provide secondary prevention services to populations at risk for family violence.
- Support family members with special medical or educational needs.
- Identify and treat incidents of child and spouse maltreatment.
- Prevent child and spouse abuse.
The unifying theme under which AF Family Advocacy operates is Building Healthy Families and Communities. It is within this spirit of treatment, intervention, prevention, education, and skill building that the Family Advocacy Program staff work to create resilient military personnel and families.
Services provided by Family Advocacy Program at Bolling include:
- Consultation to Commanders and First Sergeants
- Consultation to medical personnel
- Family Advocacy Strength-based Therapy Services
- Family Maltreatment Assessment and Treatment
- Family Member Relocation Clearances
- Family Violence Prevention Education and Training
- Information & referral services
- Prevention Services
- Special Needs Identification & Assignment Coordination
Specific programs include:
- Anger Management: Provides adults or teens with the capability of recognizing anger signs and with effective, systematic ways to deal with the anger.
- Boys Town Common Sense Parenting: Educates parents about children and teach positive methods of parenting children. Common Sense Parenting includes role-playing with situations that are common in families. Programs provide opportunity for discussion and mutual support among participants.
- Child Maltreatment - Prevention, Detection and Reporting: This program involves lecture and discussion about signs and symptoms of child maltreatment, forms of abuse, reporting procedures and requirements, and the role of Family Advocacy in maltreatment prevention.
- Conflict Management: Designed to train adults in the work place, appropriate empowering ways of resolving conflict.
- Stress Management: Provides adults or teens with the capability of recognizing signs of stress with effective, systematic ways to deal with the stress at work and/or home.
- Good Touch Bad Touch: Designed to teach children about the different kinds of contact between people as well as skills children can use to protect them from the possibility of being abused.
- Men Are From Mars; Women Are From Venus: This seminar, through the use a multimedia CD-ROM, provides information on how men and women communicate in different ways, and explores the dynamics of communication of couples in common situations.
- New Parent Support Program: A home-based program to provide military families with skills needed for a happy and healthy child-rearing experience. The NPSP nurse sees the families (to include single active duty mothers) primarily in their homes. Any family expecting a child or adopting a child or with a child under three years of age is eligible. The NPSP team (R.N., clinical social worker and social service specialist) provides services based on family needs.
- Positive Guidance: Provides positive discipline guidelines and options to do with children when misbehavior occurs. It also defines discipline, discusses reasons children misbehave and the role of modeling self-control and positive behavior.
- Prevention and Relationship Enhancement Program (PREP): This 8-hour workshop teaches communication improvement, conflict management and resolution, building a strong relationship, and identification of problem areas in the relationship.
- Respite Care: Helps those families registered in the Special Needs Identification and Assignment Coordination Process (SNIAC) (see below) who cannot afford respite care by funding a few hours of child/elder care each week or month.
- Special Needs Identification and Assignment Coordination Process (SNIAC): Supports personnel assignments. When families relocate, the process is critical to determine the availability of services for spouses and children with special needs. The process links the services of the Military Personnel Flights, the Medical Treatment Facilities, and the Family Support Centers.
- Educational and Developmental Intervention Service: This is a congressionally mandated program that provides specialty services to children with special needs, ages birth to 21.
- Time Management: This class offers a "one-shot" approach to improved time management. It is based on the needs of the participants and looks at some of the basic causes of poor time management.