A preliminary evaluation of the Together Parenting Program: A stand alone component of the Exploring Together Program
Susie Burke
Exploring Together, Carlton VIC
Michelle Soltys
Exploring Together, Carlton VIC
Margot Trinder
Exploring Together, Carlton VIC
PP: 051 - 060
Abstract
This preliminary study was designed to evaluate the effectiveness of the Together Parenting Program, a new component of the Exploring Together Program (ETP). Together Parenting is a parent management training program for parents who want to enhance their relationship with their child(ren) and learn more effective parenting strategies for managing children's emotional and behavioural problems.
This report presents an analysis of pre-post data collected from 44 parents who participated in the 10-week Together Parenting Programs. The study provided some preliminary evidence to suggest that the Together Parenting component of ETP assists parents to reduce their children's emotional and behavioural difficulties, while improving parenting practices and parental satisfaction.
Keywords
children, parents, parenting, emotional problems, behavioural problems, evaluation, program evaluation
Article Text
The Together Parenting Program was developed as a stand alone component of the multi-group Exploring Together Program (ETP) in which only parents participate in the 10-week intervention. The multi-group ETP is a proven effective intervention to treat childhood behavioural and emotional problems in order to prevent long-term antisocial behaviours and mental health problems in later childhood, adolescence and adulthood (Hemphill, 1996; Hemphill & Littlefield, 2001; Reid, 2003). ETP combines parent management training, children's social problem solving and emotion management training and parent-child interactive therapy (for a review of the 10-week multi-group program, see Hemphill & Littlefield, 2001). ETP aims to decrease children's behavioural and emotional difficulties while addressing parents' psychological needs and parenting difficulties. This program has established short-term and long-term effectiveness with preschool aged children (Reid, 2003) and primary school aged children (Hemphill & Littlefield, 2001) with emotional and behavioural difficulties.
ETP is a unique parenting program because it combines both skills-based training for children and parents, and a therapeutic component in which considerable attention is also paid to how well individuals are integrating their new skills and knowledge into their own family life, and using the group process to further develop insight into their own processes and progress. Further, ETP addresses many of the other limiting factors that Kazdin (1998) identified in interventions found in the literature, namely that they were too brief (8-10 hours), did not contain specific training components (e.g., education regarding social learning principles), and did not involve the family, or address parent, family, and environmental factors. ETP addressed all of these factors in its multi-group intervention.
In the parenting component of ETP, parents are helped to develop an understanding of factors underlying their children's behaviour, and are taught behaviour management principles and techniques. They are shown how to put these into practice through homework tasks. Each parent identifies an emotional or behavioural issue for their child, and over the 10 weeks of the program, is encouraged to build up a strategy for helping their child to manage that particular issue. Throughout all of this work, group leaders are also supporting parents to explore and challenge their own beliefs about children's behaviour and about parenting, to look at parenting issues and relationship issues, and teaching them how to confront unhelpful or distorted perceptions of their children and themselves. Parents are assisted to get more in touch with their feelings, and learn strategies to deal with their isolation, depression, lack of assertiveness and poor self-esteem. Sessions also focus on how to deal with current family issues and, if necessary, those from the families of origin. Group numbers are limited to foster the therapeutic process, and group leaders support the group members to learn through the experiences they confront within the group. A crucial element of the group is the task of establishing with individual parents what they have tried, how they applied what was taught, and exploring with them the obstacles that may be impeding their progress.
The parenting component of ETP is also unique compared to many other parenting programs as it emphasises the importance of partners or other adult support people in the parenting process, and facilitates this by providing two opportunities during the course of the 10-week program for partners/support people to attend the group. This is a requirement of attending the program.
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