History
The Case for the Parent Corps: History and Credentials

The Parent Corps is a new and extremely effective initiative in drug abuse prevention, and there’s nothing like it.

Where did the Parent Corps come from?

The Parent Corps is an effort developed and managed by National Families in Action (NFIA), which has been a leader in the adolescent drug-prevention movement since it was established in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1977.

NFIA initially helped lead the original parent movement to prevent drug use among children and adolescents, and has worked relentlessly to empower parents.

At its founding, NFIA worked with Georgia legislators to ban the sale of drug paraphernalia – toys and gadgets to enhance drug use – that were being marketed to children by the illegal drug industry to promote the use of harmful, addictive drugs like marijuana, cocaine, nitrous oxide, PCP, inhalants, and other drugs.

Drug paraphernalia became a watershed in the growing drug culture, helping parents see clearly that “bad parenting” was not responsible for adolescent drug use, but that other forces were driving the adolescent drug epidemic.

The drug epidemic mushroomed in just 17 years

The multibillion dollar drug industry was revealed through the explosion in drug use that rose between 1962 and 1979. In 1962, less than two percent of the total U.S. population – and less than one percent of adolescents – used illegal drugs. In just 17 years, 35 percent of adolescents, 65 percent of high school seniors, and 70 percent of young adults (ages 18 to 25) were using illegal drugs.

Parents were the first-responders to this epidemic

By refusing to accept complete blame for this phenomenon any longer, parents were freed to start fighting back, and fight they did.
During the next 13 years, they formed parent groups to challenge – and change – social norms that tolerated drug use.
The parent drug-prevention movement worked closely with Mothers Against Drunk Driving to raise the drinking age to 21 and reduce adolescent deaths from drunk-driving crashes.
Parents also took aim at the tobacco industry, recognizing that cigarettes and smokeless tobacco were not only dangerous themselves, but along with alcohol and marijuana, serve as gateways into the illegal drug culture for young people.
Mitchell Rosenthal, president of Phoenix House, the nation’s largest drug-treatment center, testified before Congress and described head shops as “little learning labs for young drug abusers.” His testimony was a rallying cry for getting parents involved in drug prevention across the nation and motivating them to help shut down these retail outlets.

NFIA takes original parent movement to the inner city

In 1990, NFIA received the first of two 5-year demonstration grants from the then-Office of Substance Abuse Prevention (now the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention, a division of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration) to take the parent movement to inner-city Atlanta. The goal of these two grants was to demonstrate that parents living in public-housing communities were as committed as suburban parents to protecting their children’s health and well-being by preventing them from initiating alcohol, tobacco, and other addictive drug use, even though these parents had far more barriers to overcome to achieve that goal. NFIA assembled an integrated staff and opened offices in two communities, Bankhead Courts and Techwood Homes. The organization worked with parents for five years, helping them form parent support groups to take action to protect their children.
Key to the success of this program was a collaboration with the federal agency ACTION (now the Corporation for National and Community Service, or CNCS) which enabled NFIA to recruit and pay stipends to residents through the VISTA program. These VISTA volunteers served as ambassadors and helped NFIA recruit other parents from the community into the program.
The second 5-year grant enabled NFIA to create and implement Club HERO (Helping Everyone Reach Out), an after-school program piloted at Usher Middle School that involved parents and teachers working together to provide after-school activities, including drug-prevention activities, for sixth-grade students. This program evolved after the Atlanta City School System created a middle school that drew students from elementary schools in the public-housing communities that NFIA was serving with its first OSAP/CSAP grant. Named a promising program by the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Justice, Club HERO has spread to many schools throughout Georgia and some other states.

Public education: the science that underlies addiction

In 1999, NFIA established a collaboration with Wake Forest University School of Medicine to create the Addiction Studies Program for Journalists. Funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), this ongoing program brings print and broadcast journalists from across the nation to intensive, two-day workshops where interactive lectures take place between journalists and scientists who study drug abuse and addiction at leading universities. The purpose of the program is to give journalists a background in the science that underlies drug abuse and drug addiction.

In 2005, NFIA and Wake Forest added two new partners – the Treatment Research Institute at the University of Pennsylvania and the National Conference of State Legislatures – and created the Addiction Studies Program for State Legislatures. Like the journalists’ program, the legislative program is funded by NIDA. It provides legislators and legislative staff with information about effective policy as defined by research – the economic cost of the problem and cost effective ways to address it, criminal justice issues, treatment, and prevention – as well as the science underlying addiction.

Putting it all together for the Parent Corps

This experience—helping parents form thousands of parent groups in suburbs across the nation, extending the parent movement to parents in public-housing communities in inner-city Atlanta, and teaming up with major universities to educate journalists and policy-makers—prepared NFIA to develop the Parent Corps. The purpose is to create a permanent parent movement whose efforts to prevent children from using alcohol, tobacco, and illegal drugs are grounded in both science and law.

The Parent Corps seeks to:

empower parents to serve as the first line of defense in protecting their children
ensure that parents from every income level are involved
build an institution that will last
enable parents to achieve permanent reductions in adolescent alcohol, tobacco, and other addictive drug use, similar to those achieved by the parent movement of the 1980s, in order to give all children the opportunity to reach their full potential in life