Page 32 - Johns Hopkins Nursing Magazine Spring 2023 - Johns Hopkins School of Nursing

NEWS FROM JOHNS HOPKINS NURSING The Parent Rap

Deborah Gross’ research on child

mental health puts the emphasis,

and decisions, in the right places

Professor Deborah Gross, DNSc, MS, RN, FAAN, is “Parenting is the world’s
rightly proud of her baby.
largest on-the-job training
The Chicago Parent Program (CPP) that she helped
and the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing is standing program.”
conceive at Rush University and brought to Baltimore
on its own today. And walking, from Baltimore to U.S.
cities in between and beyond its birthplaces. Gross, the Leonard and Helen R. Stulman Endowed
Professor in Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing,
“My work to develop, research, and scale the Chicago gets to nurture her own research while being handy
Parent Program from a small research initiative in with indispensable knowledge on how to germinate
Chicago to a program that is being implemented others’ great ideas, get them into the ground (the
30 in schools, early childhood programs, child mental communities that need them), water, feed, and watch
health clinics, and human services agencies across them grow too.
the country to support families raising young children
in underserved communities has been a labor of “As director, I get the chance to work with so many
love,” Gross explains of a journey that led her to Johns smart and amazing people doing impactful work in
Hopkins in 2008. “It has brought me enormous joy to the disability community—it’s a great job,” Gross
be able to make a difference in people’s lives.” explains. “I’m also really enjoying the opportunity to
share what I’ve learned about what makes a program
CPP has also become a pillar of RESILIENCE RRTC, like the Chicago Parent Program scalable across
or the Research and Education to support the Science different communities, populations, and human
of Independent Living for Inclusion and Engagement: service organizations.”
National Center of Excellence Rehabilitation Research
and Training Center, all of that funded by the National And it’s a great spot from which to observe CPP
doing … exactly what she’d hoped it would, and more.
Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Designed for parents of children 2-8 years old, CPP
JOHNS HOPKINS NURSING SPRING 2023 The center’s main initiatives have been testing home and in schools, strengthen the bond between
Rehabilitation Research. Gross is RESILIENCE
RRTC’s director.
has been proven to lessen behavioral problems at

new ways of delivering CPP as well as CAPABLE
parent and child, and offer peer-to-peer support for
low-income parents, many whose own upbringing
(short for Community Aging in Place—Advancing
Better Living for Elders), a research program long
involved violence or other trauma. It does so without
talking down to, or over, those parents. “The first thing
spearheaded by Dean Sarah Szanton, PhD, RN, FAAN,
that improves independence while also cutting health
we tell group leaders is, ‘You cannot be the expert
about somebody else’s child. Your job is to help them
care costs. RESILIENCE RRTC is working to expand
tailor strategies to achieve their goals.’ It changes the
its reach through both policy initiatives and plain-
whole dynamic.”
language fact sheets for health care organizations
and the community.