A program to help parents build strategies in dealing with and understanding a child’s problematic or violent behaviours will likely return from July.
Brophy is excited to relaunch the Who’s In Charge program in 2022. The program usually runs alongside school terms and is likely to launch from July 15 or 22 but a final start date will be confirmed.
The best bit? The course runs online via Zoom every Friday morning for eight weeks, so it can be done from the comfort of your own home!
Why is it helpful?
It helps parents understand they are not alone and it’s never too late to implement a positive change at home. It works to strengthen the child-parent relationship by focusing on the behaviour and not the child. It creates an open and no judgment forum to share ideas.
What does it hope to achieve? The short answer is quite a bit. The long answer?
- 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 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 empowering: 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 co-operative 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 co-operate 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.
Participants can either self refer, be referred by another provider or another service within Brophy.
Anybody interested or even just chasing more info can email us at whosincharge@brophy.org.au or call 5561 8888 and ask to speak to one of the team in family services.