FMF Connect

Families Moving Forward (FMF) Connect is a smartphone app developed for parents and caregivers raising children with fetal alcohol spectrum disorders. FMF Connect provides parents and caregivers useful information to help them manage their children’s condition and get peer support. FMF Connect is based on what is called the Families Moving Forward (FMF) Program that was developed by the innovative thinker Heather Carmichael Olson and her team at Seattle Children's Research Institute and the University of Washington. The wisdom of families and professionals, and careful university research, were all brought together to create the original program. The FMF Program has been scientifically tested and shown to help children with FASD and their families. Thanks to researchers Christie Petrenko and Cristiano Tapparello and their team at Mt. Hope Family Center and the University of Rochester, you can now easily access this great content in the palm of your hand with the FMF Connect app! The learning content, principles and many methods of the FMF Program have translated well to an app format, but this has also been a pretty complex process. While the content is largely the same, the intervention flow (or sequence in which it is taught) is somewhat different for the app. This research was funded by a grant (U01 AA026104) from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism as part of the Collaborative Initiative on Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (CIFASD). The content is solely the responsibility of the developers and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism or the National Institutes of Health. You can learn more about CIFASD and other research projects you may be able to participate in at https://cifasd.org/.