Child to Parent Violence / ChILD ABUSING PARENT Course

Overall Aims of the Nine Week Programme

• Reduce parent’s feelings of isolation.

• Challenge parent’s feelings of guilt.

• Lessen deterministic thinking about causes (e.g. “he can’t help it.. he has ADHD” or “… he saw his father be violent”) – it is always multi-causal.

• Reinforce belief in the possibility of change (without giving false hope or creating complacency).

• Clarify boundaries of what is acceptable and unacceptable behaviour (harder than it sounds as there are many grey areas and we need to avoid imposing our own values).

• Arm parents with some simple concepts that have proved to empower: e.g. entitlement, the power of being irresponsible, etc.

• Examine strategies for creating meaningful and practical consequences for unacceptable behaviour. The approach of most parenting courses and materials is to assume that children are basically cooperative and only need encouragement and positivity to be good. These approaches usually have failed miserably with the oppositional children of the WiC? parents. Finding consequences for children who care about little and don’t want to cooperate is very difficult

• Explore anger, both children’s and (often more usefully) parents’

• Encourage assertiveness

• Encourage self-care

• Reinforce progress and provide emotional support while parents are attempting to become more assertive parents.

Goals:

• It is expected that parents will feel less depressed and powerless by the end of the course (evaluation of those who complete the course strongly supports this at two month follow up).

• It is hoped that the amount of violence and abusive behaviour will decrease in a majority of the families and the majority of group completers do report less abuse (but this depends on many variables that are out of our control and change in children’s behaviour may be a long term consequence of changes in parental behaviour). The majority of parents (about 66%) do report an improvement in their problem child’s abusive behaviour at 2-month follow-up. However, most are still experiencing some verbal abuse and yelling. Changing parent’s behaviour is part of a long process of change for many.

• Raise awareness of the issue of violence to parents in the community and in the field.