Utilizing Motivational Interviewing while engaging fathers

Participants will learn strategies to enhance their clinical skills for engaging with fathers and families, including identifying caregiver values and goals with their family, affirmations to validate specific caregiver efforts and increase personal confidence around caregiver-child interaction, reflections to demonstrate empathy while maintaining focus, and collaborative strategies for sharing information and concerns.

Learning objectives:

1. Describe intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and their connection to father/family engagement for positive childhood outcomes.
2. Show how multiple Motivational Interviewing skills can be used to enhance caregiver-child interaction.
3. Demonstrate at least one Motivational Interviewing strategy for successful father/family engagement.
4. Understand the roots of parent motivation, including its origins, factors that sustain it, and methods to nurture fathers’ motivation and participation within the family context.
5. Assess caregiver readiness and increase their commitment to engaging in caregiver-child interactions.

Examples of MI in the Family Context:
- Collaboratively assess fathers’ roles in the family and caregiving.
- Elicit fathers’ motivations toward family and caregiving.
- Bridge the gap between fathers’ goals and values and their caregiving involvement.
Improve family collaboration to enhance father engagement in reaching developmental milestones.

This training provides practical, evidence-based approaches for educators, family advocates, and service providers to better support families, particularly fathers.

Apply the MI style, a collaborative, goal-oriented method of communication with particular attention to the language of change, to foster caregiver buy-in, motivation, and commitment to tasks.Use MI planning strategies to set specific, achievable, and time-bound goals to strengthen parental commitment to achieving developmental milestones.Implement strategies specifically designed to enhance father engagement.

Children's Network is proud to partner with Karin WIlson who will be conducting an in person Motivational Interviewing training with an emphasis on engaging fathers while utilizing the practice. Karin Wilson is an expert in Motivational Interviewing and a member of the Motivational Interviewing Network of Trainers (MINT), Karin is the founder of Theory to Action. Karin has significant research experience and has served as co-investigator on various multi-million dollar grants examining the efficacy of Motivational Interviewing (MI) in various settings. Apart from MI training and consulting, Karin has coded over 6,000 work samples with the Motivational Interviewing Treatment Integrity (MITI) coding tool. Karin has worked as a consultant with the Center on Alcoholism, Substance Abuse, and Addictions (CASAA) in New Mexico, the VA Hospital System in Alaska, the Office of the US Airforce Surgeon General in Falls Church, VA, and the University of Texas San Antonio, along with working as a psychologist within the National Health System (NHS) in the United Kingdom. Karin is also a Master Certified Health Coach with the Dr Sears Wellness Institute in San Diego, CA.