Parent training is more intense than group parenting education. It recognises that although some parents need minimal help, others require more intensive interventions (Sanders and Ralph, 2004). Parent training represents a therapeutic approach which focuses on teaching parents how to increase ‘desirable’ behaviour and decrease ‘misbehaviour’ in their children while at the same time improving the quality of interactions between parents and children all of which is aimed at producing a happier and more positive family environment (Sanders and Ralph). Parent training is often based on cognitive or behavioural theories and usually involves behavioural models.
Therapists and clinicians working in this area focus on conduct disorder in children and on changing parent behaviour – teaching parents specific ‘child management’ skills to ‘rectify’ children’s
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antisocial behaviour (Kotchick, Shaffer, Dorsey and Forehand, 2004). “Conduct disorders are characterised by a repetitive and persistent pattern of antisocial, aggressive or defiant conduct. Such behaviour is more severe than ordinary childish mischief or adolescent rebelliousness, and it goes beyond isolated antisocial acts” (National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, 2006).
Although studies have shown cognitive and behavioural therapies are effective in reducing behaviour problems (Briesmeister and Schaefer, 2007), other psychotherapy approaches (including person-centred approaches such as those promoted by Carl Rogers) have been shown to be equally effective (Shechtman and Pastor, 2005).
There are a number of critiques of the behaviour and cognitive therapy approach to parenting training:
It positions the therapist as the expert (Tilsen, 2007).
It is too Eurocentric and presents norms of child development where children should all develop the same way at the same pace regardless of contexts such as gender, culture, social location, family structure and temperament (Tilsen, 2007; Gielen and Roopnarine, 2004). As such, there is a danger that children and their behaviour are viewed from the perspective of what adults find inappropriate but which may only be temporary behaviour, or be part of a child’s normal growing up and which may disappear over time.
Behavioural models leave little room to understand a child’s impact on their own development or on parents’ thinking and experience.
IV. Implications
Since the 1960s, with governments increasingly using parenting programmes to support ‘harder-to- reach’ families, the pressure has increased on parenting education – “a field with white, middle-class roots” (Powell, 1993, p. 2) − to be relevant to more diverse families. It still needs to adjust to the increasingly diverse and complex face of parenting in the modern age and address the fundamental question of whose needs are being served when programmes are offered.
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Providing the resources required to operate the increasing number of programmes becomes a challenge in itself (Layzer, Goodson, Bernstein and Price, 2001). The surge in numbers attending has also resulted in the professionalisation of parenting education (Heath and Palm, 2006) and this presents resource and quality issues around training educators and facilitators – including agreement on a consistent set of standards based on sound theories of parenting and adult learning. Whether parenting education should even be professionalised is another question. Professionalisation often brings with it certification. Where would this leave the "parent mentor" or volunteer who delivers parent-led support groups?
Advances in technology mean there is a massive amount of information available through technology and the mass media. How parents and facilitators might be helped to identify which information and advice might actually be harmful? What about the diverse and contradictory advice given to parents that is based on different interpretations and different methods of research? As Connell-Carrick (2006) points out, there are different views about topics like infant sleeping, and research is used to bolster all these different and sometimes opposite, views.
V.
Summary
Historically, the content and delivery of parenting education reflects society’s prevailing beliefs about children and how they should be raised (usually from a white and middle-class perspective). Until the 1960s, parenting education was a middle-class activity, often provided by parent mentors themselves and operating outside government purview and its content and methods of delivery reflected this (Powell, 1993).
In New Zealand the most influential parenting support and education movements – Plunket, Playcentre and Parents’ Centre − were grown and developed from grassroots communities in response to local needs. Because they are ‘community owned and driven’ and decisions made by the parents who use them, they have changed to reflect the needs of each successive generation of parents, even as they lost their innovative edge and became accepted institutions. Parenting education is offered within a framework of support from peers and learning is provided in social settings. Parents are often given room to grow within these three organizations and take on decision- making and organizational roles.
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Since the war Governments have become more involved in parenting issues and the care of children. As a result universal programmes, some of which were developed overseas (such as Triple P and The Incredible Years), have increasingly been used in parenting education with behavioural models used for families with more complex problems. Both these forms of parenting education are sometimes embedded in family support services.
Following the rapid demographic and social changes, which greatly affected both the structure of the family and how its members interact, the level of public interest in parenting issues caused an upsurge in all forms of parenting education (Utting and Pugh, 2004). This has created pressure for parenting education to adapt and become relevant to today’s diverse population of parents and raised implications around professionalisation, resourcing and content.
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