Parenting skills

A large number of parent support programs exist to support and strengthen parenting abilities and promote the development of new competencies. Parent support programs do not share a uniform intervention, but they do have a common goal  — to improve the lives of children and their parents — and a shared strategy — to affect children by creating changes in parents’ attitudes, knowledge and/or behaviour. These programs aim to give parents the knowledge and skills they need to carry out child-rearing responsibilities effectively and provide their children with experiences and opportunities that promote child learning and development. Many of these programs are community-based initiatives designed to promote the flow of resources and supports to parents.

Successful parenting programs address specific types of child behaviour (e.g. developmental disabilities or child conduct problems) or target specific developmental transitions. They cover multiple factors, such as consistent caregiving in other contexts (preschool or day care) and maternal well-being. They devote enormous efforts to the initial training of staff who implements the programs with parents, and to maintaining the quality of the intervention over time. Finally, they maximize parents’ investment by emphasizing the importance of young children’s development and linking development to parenting skills and healthful decisions.

These successful programs give parents opportunities to meet together and provide peer support. The data are particularly strong for programs that combine a parent support intervention with direct educational services for children, with both components contributing to improved outcomes for children.

Parent-support programs play an important preventive role. An analysis of the costs and benefits of several intervention strategies indicated that parent training was more cost-effective in preventing later crime than home visiting plus day care or supervision of delinquents. Still, the challenge for Canadian health and social-service providers is to promote optimal parenting in a proactive and cost-effective manner. The barriers are numerous: service fragmentation, narrowness of mandate, power differential created by provider expertise, and access problems due to location, language or hours of availability.

In research on parenting and support programs, four trends need to considered: specifying parenting skills both within and outside the home (for example, the importance of interpreting events, establishing a routine, being alert to outside resources); specifying outcomes, for children or for parents (and determining which processes are related to which outcomes); finding ways of putting children more fully into the picture (i.e. considering children’s views of what makes a good parent); and paying greater attention to cultural variations in the way parents think, feel or act. Research in the area of parent-child interaction must therefore continue to expand to evaluate outcomes in a broader variety of ethnic, racial, cultural and socioeconomic groups.

See also...

• How important is it?
• What do we know?
• According to experts
• Key messages