Psychologists promote positive parenting

Edward O'Daly

Ms Sellas will evaluate the program as part of her master's degree Photo: Edward O'Daly

22 August 2006: The University is helping parents to do the most important job of all: raise their children.

Through its Enhancing Family Strengths through Positive Parenting program, the University's psychology clinic is using its expertise both to help parents deal with the challenges of parenting and to evaluate the training program itself.

The course is a modified version of existing positive parenting programs and aims to help parents tackle tantrums, eating problems and misbehaviour.

"Being a parent is one of the most difficult and challenging roles that a person can perform," psychology master's student Penny Sellas said.

"Yet few parents are able to access useful advice on how to deal with the difficult situations that will arise throughout their child's development.

"What we do is identify parents' strengths and help them build on them - we don't say 'this is what you are doing wrong'.

"We want to give parents the tools and strategies they need early on to prevent problems later."

Ms Sellas will run the five-week program and evaluate its effectiveness through psychological testing before and after the program and by seeking feedback from parents after the program. Points parents had found particularly useful in previous programs will be emphasised in the forthcoming sessions.

Future programs were likely to have an extra session five weeks after the program in place of the current phone call, in response to parents' feedback, she added.

"We continually modify the program to give parents the most useful help possible," Ms Sellas said.

Ms Sellas hopes to continue research into parenting as a PhD.