The Incredible Years Parenting Program

The Children’s Clinic, in collaboration with the Northampton Public Schools, will be offering the Incredible Years Parenting Program this spring. The Incredible Years Parent Training Intervention is a series of research-based trainings focused on strengthening parenting competencies and involving parents in their children’s school experiences in order to promote academic, social, and emotional competencies. Different programs are offered to parents depending on the age of the children. At this time, we are focusing on 3-8 year olds.

There will be a free 12 week group for parents of children between 3-8 years of age. The group will meet once a week, from 5:30-7:30 PM, with dinner and child care provided.

If you know of families who would benefit from this group, please contact Barbara Black, 587-1471 or bblack@northampton-k12.us, or Dr. Cynthia Monahon, 587-3265 or cmonahon@cutchins.org. (We do not have transportation built into the program but will work to find a way to transport families if necessary.)

Additional information on the Incredible Years is outlined below:

The Incredible Years Programs have two long range goals:

The first goal is to provide cost-effective, early prevention that all families of young children can use to promote social, emotional, and academic competence and to prevent children from developing conduct problems. The second goal is to provide comprehensive intervention for teachers and parents that are targeted at treating and reducing the early onset of conduct problems in young children (ages 2-8 years).

The short term goals are to:

• Strengthen children’s social and appropriate play skills (turn-taking, asking, waiting, helping, complementing, and sharing
• To promote children’s use of self-control strategies, such as effective problem-solving,
  Increase emotional awareness by labeling feelings, recognizing the differing views of themselves and others, and enhancing perspective taking
• Boost academic success, reading and school readiness
• Reduce defiance, aggressive behavior, and related conduct problems such as non-compliance, peer aggression, and rejection, bullying, stealing, and lying
• Decrease children’s negative attribution and conflict management approaches
• Increase self-esteem and self-confidence

Goals specific to the parent program:

• Promote parent competencies and strengthen families
• Increase positive and nurturing parenting
• Reduce critical and violent discipline approaches by replacing spanking with positive strategies such as ignoring, using logical and natural consequences, redirecting, adequate monitoring and problem solving
• Improve parents’ problem-solving skills, anger management, and communication skills
• Increase family support networks and school involvement
• Help parents and teachers work collaboratively to ensure consistency across settings
• Increase parents’ involvement in children’s academic-related activities at home

www.incredibleyears.com

These groups are being funded through grants from Northampton Education Foundation (NEF), Cutchins Childrens Services, and health insurance.