Welcome!

Natasha Slesnick

I am a hard-core family systems researcher with particular interest in adolescents. My training was in Functional Family Therapy and I am partial to ecologically-based models of family therapy and to the contextual model.

I believe that a fundamental human need is to be connected to others in trustable and loving relationships and that an individual and family cannot be treated apart from the environment within which they are embedded. This is the core of my change philosophy and drives all of my intervention efforts.

During graduate school I conducted Functional Family Therapy with substance abusing adolescents and their parents as part of a clinical trial, and I found that some youth in these families ran away from home. Also, these families were more difficult to treat when a member was being ejected (or was self-ejecting) from the family. This sparked my interest in runaways.

My first two grants focused on runaway youth; I recruited youth from the local runaway shelters and it was during that time that I met a few youth who came to the shelter but left within 24 hours of their arrival (to avoid their parents or social services being called). I talked to several of these youth and determined that they were a different type of runaway - they were street living youth. This led to the next thread of my research focus.

As street living youth are cut-off from their families, I could not reasonably conduct family therapy and re-unite these youth. Therefore, the intervention for street living youth involves working with the youth alone but is ecologically focused. The ultimate goal of this research is to provide guidance through empirically supported interventions to those who serve this population. Specifically, I seek to identify interventions that re-unite runaway youth with their families and re-integrate homeless youth into the mainstream. This research includes evaluation of techniques to engage and maintain youth and families in treatment, reduce substance use and mental health problems and increase family, individual and social functioning. Overall, this work has consumed me.

My plans include expanding my research to family therapy development for substance abusing mothers and their children. Thus, I have a pending project focused on evaluating Ecologically-Based Family Therapy with single-mother families which integrates adolescent children into their mother's substance abuse treatment. The project will compare home-based family therapy to office-based family therapy and treatment as usual through the substance abuse treatment facility (Maryhaven, Inc.). The question is whether including the adolescent child in the mother's recovery process reduces relapse and improves other outcomes for the mother, as well as improves outcomes for the adolescent, including prevention (or reduction) of substance use and other problems. This project is particularly exciting as it has the potential to have broad application to single mother families seeking substance abuse treatment.

Another pending project of interest to me seeks to develop an ecologically-based treatment intervention for single homeless mothers and their 2-6 year old children. The goal of this proposal is to positively impact both the mother and child in the areas of social stability and psychological functioning as well as to reduce the potential for the child to be removed from the mother's care.

Finally, I am interested in testing an alternative to foster care for homeless youth. Currently, unaccompanied minors have two options - to return home to a family situation or to become a ward of the state and get placement into foster care (including group homes). For the youth that I serve, these are not viable options, and a viable option needs to be identified (such as housing) since stabilization without housing is impossible.

Natasha Slesnick, Ph.D.
Professor, Department of Human Development and Family Science