Positive Parenting

Parenting is complicated and challenging even in the best of circumstances, and it can be far more difficult when parents lack knowledge about effective parenting strategies or when dealing with stressful personal or family situations. In some cases, poor parenting can be extreme enough to qualify as child maltreatment.

Unfortunately, even well-meaning parents with no intention of harming their children can use parenting practices that are detrimental to their children’s development and well-being. Some examples are psychological maltreatment (PM), various forms of corporal punishment (CP), and neglect, all of which have been documented in extensive research to negatively and sometimes profoundly affect children.

The goal of our positive parenting project is to disseminate useful information about parenting methods that families can adopt to replace their less effective parenting strategies. We chose the positive parenting framework as the foundation for this work because it exemplifies a sensitive, respectful, and nonviolent approach to both child development and discipline, and because its core elements have solid empirical support. 

Our goal is to develop a directory of parenting resources and parent training programs that embody the positive parenting approach that can help parents learn to more effectively parent.  When available, the directory will be posted on this web page.  

Issues in Brief

Contributors

Authors