The Education Futures Trust ran an Incredible Years Parenting Course on Friday mornings at the Red Lake Children’s Centre.
From the beginning, the warm and welcoming atmosphere of the Children’s Centre encouraged a positive response. The parents interacted well from the start, building up a supportive group who encouraged each other and celebrated their successes.
The aim of the course was to:
improve parent-child interactions, building positive parent child relationships and attachment, promote positive nurturing parenting, help parents develop strategies to manage their own feelings, enabling them to positively manage challenging behaviour.
The course firstly encouraged building up a positive parent-child relationship through a serious of stages: play, praise/encouragement and rewards. Once these were in place we introduced limit setting, ignoring and consequences /time out. At this stage parents were building up a different relationship with their children, who were now more responsive to limits, commands and consequences being presented in a firmer and positive way.
The course was made up of discussions, presentation, setting goals and problem solving, skills practice and home activities to practice the skills learnt. At each session as a group, we evaluated and learned from the parents’ experiences the previous week, building on successes and looking at what might have gone better.
At the end the parents were awarded a certificate of attendance to acknowledge their commitment and achievements. The parents were very positive about the benefits of the course to each of them and their families.
Improved child social competence, emotional regulation, academic readiness and problem solving.
Improved parent‐child interactions, positive parent‐child relationships and attachment. Reductions in parental depression and increases in parental self confidence.
Parents will behave the opportunity to develop both personally as individuals and as parents. The group setting allows for effective discussion and reflection.
Parents will have the opportunity to learn new strategies and be given the support to implement them.
The IYPP is a twelve week programme with each session lasting 2 hours per week with a minimum of 10 participants per course.
Each course runs on a Wednesday morning from 9:30-11:30 at Wellington Square Baptist Church in Hastings.
12 randomized trials of the parenting programmes carried out by C. Webster‐Stratton, 2006; C. Webster‐Stratton & Reid, 2003 and six independent replications have shown:
Increased parental positive affect
Increased effective parental limit‐setting, discipline techniques and increased monitoring of children.
Increased positive family communication and problem‐solving.
Reductions in parental depression and increases in parental selfconfidence.