Psychology of Parenting Project
Since 2010 The Psychology Directorate has been leading on the Scottish wide Psychology of Parenting Project (PoPP). Led by the increasing focus on early intervention, this initiative is aimed at improving the availability of high-quality evidence-based parenting programmes for families with young children who have elevated levels of behaviour problems.
As many as ten percent of preschool children display unusually high levels of behaviour difficulties. Longitudinal research is helping us recognise the "trajectory" from here, through juvenile delinquency into early adult hood criminality and social isolation. The cost to the individuals is immense as is the burden on the public purse. Recognising that positive parenting practices mediate these outcomes, social learning theory-based parenting programmes have been developed. The best of these are capable of helping up to 2/3rds of these children leave their risk-laden developmental trajectories.
Through the experience of empowering therapeutic relationships, parents participating in these group-based programmes are helped to encourage good behaviours and to build their children's social and emotional competence. The parents are also coached to manage undesirable behaviours in ways that are sensitive to their child's developmental needs. Evidence also suggests that these group-based parenting programmes have the added advantages of improving maternal mental health and promoting social support between parents.
The PoPP began by considering the best current evidence in parenting programmes and established that two packages had particularly extensive and robust bodies of research at both the "gold standard" randomised control trial level and at the level of local, serviced based delivery. Considerable time was then committed to scoping current practices in the delivery of evidence based parenting across Scotland. This established that, while many practitioners were trained in the content of these packages, this did not consistently translate into groups being offered to parents.
At local level there is often a range of hurdles between training and delivery which present challenges to service and individual clinicians. The project therefore set about developing a dissemination plan capable of addressing the barriers that are inevitably encountered when evidence-based programmes require to be scaled up and delivered, with fidelity, in real-world settings.
