Changing Relationships through Interactions: Preliminary Accounts of Parent-Child Interactions after Undertaking Individual Parent Training

"Sometimes I think my frustration is the real issue": A qualitative study of parents' experiences of transformation after a parenting programme

Introduction

Parenting programmes help to alleviate conduct problems in children, but ensuring that all parents feel supported to attend, complete and learn from these programmes has proven difficult. Parents can feel overwhelmed and struggle to change their parenting. This article aims to inform the future refinement of parenting programmes by examining parents’ narratives of how programmes motivated them to change and enabled them to put changes into practice.

Method and results

Forty-two parents, most of whom had attended Incredible Years group sessions, were interviewed about their views and experiences of parenting programmes that focused on positive parenting practices. Analysis of interview transcripts drew on thematic approaches. Parents perceived that parenting programmes helped them to better understand their child and themselves and to let go of anxieties surrounding their child’s behaviour. Better understanding included greater awareness of emotions and of behaviours their child could and could not control. Parents believed this awareness helped them to change the ways that they interacted with their child, which, in turn, helped them and their child to feel calmer. With greater understanding and calmness parents believed they became more able to see for themselves the changes that they could make in their parenting and everyday lives, and to feel more confident in putting these into practice.

Discussion

By supporting parents to reflect on their own and their child’s situation, parents perceived that programmes enabled them to improve interactions with their children without getting stuck in self-blame or feeling overwhelmed. Parents of children whose behaviour remained challenging believed that programmes led to beneficial changes in the way they felt about their child’s behaviours. Enhanced support for reflection by parents could potentially help more families to benefit from parenting programmes.

Restorative Parenting: Delivering Trauma-Informed Residential Care for Children in Care

Background

There are 78,150 children in care in England and 12% live in group residential settings. Little empirical research informs our understanding of how these vulnerable children heal from multi-type trauma in residential homes. Evidence-based multisystemic trauma-informed models of care are needed for good quality consistent care.

Objective

Using a novel multisystemic trauma-informed model of care with an embedded developmental monitoring index, the Restorative Parenting Recovery Programme, pilot data was collected from young people and care staff from four residential homes over a two-year period. Five key developmental areas of children’s recovery were investigated through monthly monitoring data. Staff were also interviewed to explore their experiences of delivering the intervention to contextualise the findings.

Methods

Data was gathered from 26 children, aged 6–14 years, over a two-year period. Their developmental wellbeing was measured using the Restorative Parenting Recovery Index and analysed through a comparison of means. To add further context to this preliminary analysis, qualitative interviews were undertaken with 12 Therapeutic Parents to explore their perceptions of how the Restorative Parenting Recovery Programme influenced the children’s development.

Results

Young people showed significant improvements on indices relating to relationships (p = 0.002, d=0.844). Significant changes are observed during the first half of the programme in self-perception (p = 0.006, d = 0.871) and self-care (p = 0.018, d = 0.484), although limited progress around self-awareness and management of impulses and emotions.

Conclusions

This novel integrative approach to re-parenting and embedded measurement system to track the children’s progress is the first of its kind and has originated from extensive multisystemic clinical practice.