“We envision a New Hampshire where all children grow up free from abuse and neglect.” So says the mission statement of NH Children’s Trust, a statewide, community-based child abuse prevention agency founded in 1986. Its goal is to connect parents with providers to strengthen families and build resilient communities.

April is Child Abuse Prevention month, and the Children’s Trust’s priority is to raise awareness of New Hampshire’s network of Family Resource Centers whose programs bridge the gaps that grow when stressors overwhelm parents. Part of its role as the NH’s facilitating organization is to partner with 26 family resource center locations across the state and provide them with the support, coordination, training and technical assistance they require in order to reach high-quality standards.

“When families are stronger, the occurrence of child abuse drops,” said Cliff Simmonds, executive director of the Children’s Trust. “When we get these factors like pandemics and inflation and economic uncertainty and housing and all this, they tend to go up.”

He added: “Let’s not wait to intervene. How about we provide the strengthening that (families) need, whether it’s education, community or other supports that are really necessary in all our lives, that we oftentimes take for granted, and give it to those folks so they’re in a position of strength? It then strengthens the community, the businesses in that community, and then you have this really healthy environment.”

Building connections

New Hampshire is facing many challenges that affect residents in areas such as housing, inflation, child care, substance abuse, mental health and healthcare costs.

In order to help people and their families manage such high levels of stress, Family Resource Centers offer programs and resources to help overcome, or work towards overcoming, those challenges.

“We recognize that parenting can be stressful for everybody; it’s normal to be stressed. Our goal is to help families alleviate some of that so they can be the nurturing parents that they want to be,” said Penny Vaine, program manager of Healthy Starts at Home Healthcare, Hospice & Community Services in Keene.

A major factor in most everyone’s daily lives is work.

Forty-plus hours Monday through Friday are normally spent on work-related tasks, not to mention everything else going on, such as parenting, cooking meals, transporting children to school or after-school programs, and maintaining a healthy lifestyle, in addition to struggles outside of our control: inflation, high healthcare costs, lack of child care, housing shortages and mental health fatigue after a three-year-long pandemic.

Employers are in a position to help. As Amanda Osmer, principal and fourth-generation owner of Grappone Automotive Group, asks: “Do you or do you not put your team members first? Specifically, are you there to listen when they need somebody to listen? Have you created an environment where people don’t feel psychologically unsafe or feel they’re going to be in trouble if they come to you — whether it’s struggling with addiction, or maybe they have somebody close to them that has problems with addiction, that prevents them from being to work on time?” According to the NH Children’s Trust, here are some ways employers can support their team members in the workplace:

■Build connections between employees to local Family Resource Centers that offer supports that strengthen families and reduces stressors.

■Establish paid family leave to ensure parents can spend time with their children throughout their children’s development.

■Support access to affordable and quality child care and access to early childhood education.

■Grant flexible working time arrangements so parents and kinship caregivers can be with their children whenever necessary.

■Ensure decent working conditions, such as pay that is commensurate with the cost of living for New Hampshire families.

“For us to pretend that it’s not happening and leave your problems at the door — that’s not reality,” said Osmer. “The whole person shows up to work, so we need to figure out that the brain is important, as if you had a broken limb.”

Where prevention begins

If businesses take care to support their employees both inside and outside of work, they can help prevent child abuse and neglect before it happens, experts said.

When it comes to wages, according to K.M. Raissian and L.R. Bullinger’s “Child Youth Services Review,” published in 2017, every $1 increase in the minimum wage is associated with a 9.6 percent reduction in neglect reports.

Additionally, a 10 percent increase in the federal earned income tax credit led to a 9 percent decrease in the annual number of child-neglect reports made to child welfare agencies over a 14-year period.

And one study from the American Academy of Pediatrics found that each additional $1,000 that states spend annually on public benefit programs per person living in poverty is associated with a 4.3 percent reduction in child maltreatment reports; a 4 percent reduction in substantiated child maltreatment; a 2.1 percent reduction in foster care placements; and a 7.7 percent reduction in child fatalities related to abuse or neglect.

“The most powerful thing that we can do as an employer is just be true to our word,” Osmer said. “Put it out there, walk the walk. Our mission is our guiding light — we have to take care of our team; that’s what we do.”

Vaine offers some further advice: “If a business is recognizing that there’s tardiness or poor attendance or something, they can reach out and suggest to their employee that there are FRCs (Family Resource Centers) in the community that can help them figure some of those things out, whether that is time management or how to get a dependable vehicle. Those are not easy tasks as a parent.”

Brenda Guggisberg, executive director of The Upper Room in Derry, agrees: “We are exhausting the systems, the hospitals and the mental health centers just to support families around those needs. In that same vein, I see all of those deficits being countered by the amazing resilience that families have. This is all heavy stuff, but there are some brave warriors out there.”

“There’s a lot of complications within the whole system,” said Simmonds, “but there’s a lot of simple things that we can all do that strengthen our communities, families and neighbors, and that’s what we try to bring forward.”

To find out more about how employers can help employees, contact your local Family Resource Center to collaborate on a plan that benefits your team to create families with strong bonds.

How to contact a family resource center

For more information about the centers, the programs they offer and cities they serve, visit nhchildrenstrust.org.

These articles are being shared by partners in The Granite State News Collaborative. For more information visit collaborativenh.org.

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