The SPEAK program is an enhanced practical application that integrates CRC’s ongoing successful access delivery platform with a standardized, continuous parent education model that “picks up” from the initial receptivity to mandatory courses to facilitate improved parental cooperation, awareness and response to the child(ren)’s best interests. Utilizing “best practices” of a predominately social/educational format, SPEAK attempts to satisfy wide service gaps between individual demands and legal objectives and cooperatively promote healthy family relationships that better prevent abuse, neglect and development of at-risk behaviors in children. Under current systems and practices, parents ordered to accomplish neutral access have little incentive to cooperate beyond the basic order of simply dropping off or picking up their child(ren). Instead, previously destructive behaviors more privately exercised between parents is now relegated to the child(ren) as the “go between” to communicate, spy, choose, deny or otherwise harass the other parent or family. All of which is accomplished in compliance with the access order, but certainly out of the intent of the court. Employing interactive methods to teach behavioral awareness and change techniques, coupled with financial incentives and service enforcement, SPEAK provides an appealing motivation and common alternative for both parents to explore a cooperative, nurturing relationship of their child(ren).
SPEAK appropriately re-focuses parental priorities from highly conflicted custody and access disputes to communicate and familiarize quarrelling parents about the manner and consequences of negative parental influences on children; and to motivate parental learning that enforces positive and meaningfully cooperation among families and issues. The Program provides a versatile and culturally sensitive, yet structured, interactive format to well accomplish this purpose through a wrap-around menu of parenting education courses and access services.
At the core of CRC’s strategic advantage is the capacity for development and standardization of parent education, access services, and research practices on a statewide and national basis to better identify and service parenting needs and thus determine the effectiveness of interventions before, during and after the transformation of the family and their long-term consequences to children. In short, SPEAK is a comprehensive spectrum of services that:
- Supports healthy relationships and continue parental and extended family ties by building skills and cooperation that focus first on the “best interests” of children
- Mitigate the long-term damaging effects to children and development of harmful and destructive behaviors caused by divorce and conflicted relationship break-ups of the parents;
- Provides education, community support and sense of self-responsibility self-help to both parents to remain in an integral part of the family unit during all phases of a parental relationship.
- Encourages parents to agree and understand the importance remaining emotionally and financially supportive of their child(ren) in an equal, shared parenting status;
- Provides monitored access (transfer and supervised visitation) services to continue or increase opportunities for child - parental contact and relationship building; and
- Promulgate educational, research and advocacy strategies that increase community awareness and advance constructive legislative interventions of many at-risk issues and preventive measures.
- Decreases the dangerous behavior, contentious nature, personal inconvenience, and significant expense associated with litigious recidivism in court.
Continuation of family relationship perspectives developed through SPEAK will facilitate parental learning before and after marriage (or never-married relationships) and serve to better identify and lessen the consequences to at-risk children in a timely and cost effective response resulting in less frequency, duration or intensity of legal/enforcement processes, and reliance upon public assistance programs.
