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The complexity of today's world is helping to define parenting as one of the new challenges of the millennium. Parents and families confront ever new and perplexing choices created by modern technology and the new "information" economy, further fuelled by the mass media, marketing, urban life, multiculturalism, and divergent fashions in dress, music, and lifestyle.
Parents can easily feel ill-prepared for the task of parenting in today's world. They must face financial pressures, a decline in family and social values, not to mention the erosion of parental and religious authority as a guide for living.
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The consequences of modern-day stress on our children can be seen in increasing rates of mental disorder, suicide, and drug and alcohol abuse. Underachievement and poor motivation at school and on the job are commonplace. Our children also face intense peer pressures to conform, including pressure from gangs to behave aggressively toward others -- as recent tragic events in our own community testify.
Confident and skilled parenting is one of our children's greatest sources of strength. It helps them develop inner resources for coping with stress, resisting peer pressure, and defining paths of achievement and accomplishment. But parents too are strengthened by their own skilled parenting, which helps them feel more fulfilled and balanced when they understand and fulfill their proper parenting role in their children's lives.
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We offer two groups for parents:
1. Parenting Strategies for Children(5-12 years)
2. Parenting Strategies for Adolescents( 13-18 years).
The groups are intensive 8-week training programs in which parents study basic issues of parenting using materials from top authorities in the field, and then together implement new strategies of child management at home to teach compliance and inspire motivation in their children.
Parenting any child requires behavioural skill and emotional sensitivity on the part of the parent. However, children with disruptive behaviour disorders -- ADHD, conduct disorder, or oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) -- present a very special challenge for parents. The Parenting Strategies groups will emphasize the parenting skills required for these high-risk children and adolescents.
The groups will be "hands-on" and practical, helping parents to adopt new ways of dealing with their children. A number of themes will be addressed: the encouragement of positive behaviours, improving parent-child relationships, managing conflicts and transitions from one activity to another, increasing of compliance, improving self- regulation, dealing with anti-social behaviour, token/point systems, and promoting achievement/self-esteem. We will use programs and materials from many experts in behavioural management.
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