Web-Based Parenting Support: Development of the COPING Confident Parenting Programme

Judith Hutchings,Dawn Owen,Margiad Williams

doi:10.3390/educsci8020059

Abstract

Parents have the most significant impact on children’s development and the key parenting factors that promote child development and wellbeing are well known. Furthermore, many behavioural, social and emotional problems in children are associated with poor parenting practices. Parenting interventions that address parental skill deficits and teach positive parenting principles based on social learning theory are effective and are the recommended treatment for conduct disorder. Alongside the development of treatment programmes, universal parenting programmes have been developed; many present the same core parenting principles but their rationales vary from promoting children’s development to addressing common behavioural challenges and the evidence for these programmes is less well established. Most parents now have internet access and are making daily use of it, including seeking advice on parenting matters but that advice is often anecdotal and lacking evidence. In the meantime, a small number of web-based programmes, including parenting programmes have been developed and evaluated. This paper summarises the rationale for web-based universal programmes to support parents and briefly describes the history, content and a summary of the initial research on the COPING (confident parent internet guide) programme developed by the authors. The paper concludes with suggestions for future research directions.

Highlights

Young children spend a lot of time with their parents and, even when they spend time in day-care, time spent with parents still has the single most significant influence on their development [1].Good parenting makes an important contribution to preventing child mental health problems, promoting child health and well-being and achieving good child outcomes [2,3]
It is the extent to which these risk factors compromise parenting that matters [7] rather than by direct influence on child behaviour and many randomised controlled trials (RCTs) have demonstrated the benefits of teaching positive parenting strategies to parents of children with behavioural difficulties [5,8] including with those families experiencing significant social disadvantage [9,10]
Results from the Arnold et al [55] parenting scale that identifies three aspects of problematic parenting showed that, in comparison to the mean scores of parents of children without behavioural problems, the mean sample scores were problematic on all three sub-scales

Summary

Introduction

Young children spend a lot of time with their parents and, even when they spend time in day-care, time spent with parents still has the single most significant influence on their development [1].Good parenting makes an important contribution to preventing child mental health problems, promoting child health and well-being and achieving good child outcomes [2,3]. Young children spend a lot of time with their parents and, even when they spend time in day-care, time spent with parents still has the single most significant influence on their development [1]. There are many risk factors for poor child outcomes for disruptive behaviour difficulties, including poverty, young parenthood, single parenthood, maternal depression, unemployment and poor parental educational attainment [6]. It is the extent to which these risk factors compromise parenting that matters [7] rather than by direct influence on child behaviour and many randomised controlled trials (RCTs) have demonstrated the benefits of teaching positive parenting strategies to parents of children with behavioural difficulties [5,8] including with those families experiencing significant social disadvantage [9,10]

Results

Discussion

Conclusion