Parenting Education

To better define the essentials of effective parenting, the U.S. Cooperative Extension Service gathered a team of parent educators to develop a model of parenting education called the National Extension Parent Education Model (NEPEM) (Smith, Cudaback, Goddard, Myers-Walls 1994) that is intended to provide a common ground and common language for any person involved in parenting education. The heart of the model is a summary of critical parenting practices. Parent educators can draw on this core to structure and guide their program efforts.

The report identifies six categories of critical parenting practices:

• Care for self;
• Understand;
• Guide;
• Nurture;
• Motivate; and
• Advocate.

Care for self includes self-knowledge and management of life demands, as well as developing and using support systems. Parents who have learned to care for themselves effectively are more likely to provide a secure, supportive, and predictable environment for childrearing.

To understand a child includes the parents' knowledge of child development in general as well as insight into the style and preferences of each of their children individually. Understanding developmental issues, specific preferences, and circumstantial presses for each child, can help parents tune into and respond helpfully to the needs of each child.

To guide includes behavior that establishes boundaries or limits. Because flexibility and balance are vital to effective guidance, the most effective parenting will allow the child to make as many decisions as possible.

Nurture includes the expression of affection in ways that are effective with each child; basic care-giving, listening, and providing a sense of heritage are also elements of nurture.

To motivate a child means to stimulate imagination, curiosity, and ambition. Effective parenting performance in this area is presumed to develop children who are more effective in school and who are more likely to be lifelong learners.

Advocate, which stresses the identification and use of community resources to benefit children, recognizes that parents are in a unique role to advocate for their own children specifically, and for social change in general.

Each of these six categories in the model is discussed in the report along with a summary of key research findings.

NEPEM is an attempt to focus the content of parenting education on core issues. The model with accompanying discussion was distributed to county Extension offices and is available on the web (see Bibliography for web address).