Sometimes helping children, means helping their parents.

That’s what Roca, Inc., does. A nonprofit organization founded in Chelsea in 1988, Roca disrupts “the cycle of incarceration and poverty.”

Its approach? Relentless outreach.

That used to include a home-visiting program. But in 2012, Roca decided to take a more intensive approach with young moms who, its website says, are “not ready, willing and able to participate in work, school and traditional parenting and home visiting programs.”

“They have a history of intergeneration trauma,” Sunindiya Bhalla says of these mothers. “They have high ACES,” adverse childhood experiences, “and their children have high ACES.” Bhalla is Roca’s chief of 2Gen Strategy & Programming.

The Moms and children that Roca helps may be dealing with violence, trauma, gang involvement, or drug and alcohol use. Some have dropped out of high school. Some have limited English skills or no work history. Often, Bhalla says, no one is teaching these mothers how to be parents.

One of their biggest struggles: “Our young parents are really judged by everyone,” Bhalla says. “So it’s really hard for them to thrive when circumstances work against them because of people’s perceptions of them as parents.” This is particularly true for parents who are struggling to regain lost custody of their children.

What these mothers do have is a lot of love for their children, and Roca builds on that foundation through its Young Mothers Program.

Founded in 2012, this program provides four years of highly personal, two-generation support. The program currently operates in Chelsea and Springfield and serves 200 parents and nearly 260 children, most of whom are zero to three years old.

Moms typically start out taking classes to earn a GED, study English, or build their basic literacy skills. As the program goes on, parents build life and work skills.

Roca uses a Cognitive Behavioral Therapy approach to teach parenting skills. Take the nearly universal experience of being a parent whose child has a meltdown in the grocery store. What do you need to tell yourself, Roca asks moms, to act differently, to go from being annoyed to being effective?

Roca also assesses children’s needs and makes appropriate referrals for children. Some have delays in their social/emotional development or in their communication and gross motor skills.

To empower parents, Roca teaches them about what healthy childhood development looks like. This is particularly important for parents who, because they are adolescents themselves, are still going through their own neurological development.

One of Roca’s results is greater family stability. Parents have developed the skills they need to access and use services like child care and sign up for benefits like food stamps and transitional assistance. Bhalla says that Massachusetts’ Department of Transitional Assistance has helped by making it easier for young parents to access services.

There’s also increased readiness. Children are better prepared to learn. And parents have the skills they need to move toward economic independence.

One example is Kerry, a young woman featured on Roca’s website, who left Colombia and moved to the United States. She became pregnant at age 16.

“During my pregnancy my dad didn’t help me with anything. He made it very difficult for me to get any help.”

Kerry dropped out of high school. Her baby was born premature. And she needed a job so she could pay her own and her daughter’s bills. She tried working in restaurants where her hours were unpredictable. She worked in a bar where she felt disrespected. Eventually she came to Roca and took a class to study for HiSet, a high school equivalency skills test. She got a job on a Roca street cleaning crew. But when Kerry became pregnant a second time, she stopped coming to Roca.

Fortunately, Roca’s relentless outreach kicked in. Even when Kerry didn’t have a phone, she kept hearing from her Roca youth worker, and that support helped her stabilize her life. Bhalla says that Kerry now works in housing as a certified occupancy specialist for Beacon Communities, a property management company, that has worked with Roca to train people to do this work.

What’s next? Roca already uses data to tracks parents’ outcomes. Now the plan is to develop a protocol for studying the long-term outcomes of children.

It’s all part of Roca’s relentless effort to learn more about how best to help even the most vulnerable families grow strong and thrive.