Parent Support Groups
General parenting support groups are currently held in collaboration with other community organizations. These groups provide a variety of tools to help parents and children increase empathy for each other, build family morals and values, and praise desirable behavior. Parents learn alternative methods of discipline without violence. They learn the relationship between choices and consequences, and how to encourage positive family learning experiences.
The School Based Parent Leadership Training
This is a group-based program provided in local schools to help with academic success. Parents learn their responsibility to provide a supportive home/school environment; e.g. setting regular bedtimes, morning routines, and packing backpacks the night before, making sure their children are up to date medically with current immunizations, and will learn as well as understand the need to send their children to school happy, calm, motivated to learn, and well behaved.
These workshops have resulted in increased parental involvement and increased productivity in the students. The school based parenting groups improve attendance and attitude towards learning and facilitates student integration into the school system. The home/school connection is emphasized.
The Parent Project
A curriculum based parent training program designed specifically for parents of strong-willed or out-of-control adolescent children. It teaches concrete identification, prevention, and intervention strategies for the most destructive of adolescent behaviors (e.g. poor school attendance and performance, alcohol and drug use, gangs and violence).
Consisting of two parts, Parent Project is designed to “help parents effectively demonstrate their love for their children, ensure parents experience early success, encourage parents to stay with the process, teach intervention/prevention strategies, and improve parent/child relationships”. Parent Project is firmly grounded in the principles of behavior modification. Thus, the program places low initial emphasis on youth insight and much more emphasis on appropriate parental control to change youth behavior. It is anticipated that youth attitudinal change will follow youth behavioral change (Fry et al., 2003).
Parent Project facilitators teach parents to influence their children and motivate them to change their own behavior via positive strokes, positive consequences, and negative consequences. Altogether, Parent Project’s goal is to empower parents, through instruction of effective strategies that can be applied to nearly all populations and are based on behavioral concepts.
What is it?
• A 10 to 16-week parent training program designed specifically for parents of strong-willed or out-of-control adolescent children.
• The curriculum teaches concrete identification, prevention, and intervention strategies for the most destructive of adolescent behaviors (poor school attendance and performance, alcohol and other drug use, gangs, runaways, and violent teens).
How does it work?
Parents attend and learn in a classroom setting, to manage teen behavior problems at home.
An activity based 216-page workbook, “A Parent’s Guide to Changing Destructive Adolescent Behavior,” is available only to program participants.
Parents meet one time per week, two to three hours per session, for between 10 – 16 weeks.
Parent support groups are formed using the UCLA, Self-Help Support Group model.