The Incredible Years: A Trouble-Shooting Guide for Parents of Children Aged 3-8

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Incredible Years parenting programme was developed by Carolyn Webster-Stratton in 1997. It is designed to be a community based programme to help parents of children with ADHD, conduct problems and promote emotional and social development, emotional regulation, and improve academic success. Comprehensive leader manuals are available at http://incredibleyears.com/programs/implementation/. Research on How to Implement the Program The 3rd edition has many new features. It is formatted for easier reading, with pull-out sections highlighting key principles and parenting tools. It includes pictures from the video program chosen to remind parents of the vignette discussions they had in their groups. There are also detailed scripts that include social, emotion, academic and persistence coaching dialogues for parents to model, prompt, describe, expand and praise. Scripts are also included to support parents use of puppets and pretend play designed to enhance their children’s learning, modeling and practice of appropriate social and emotion behaviors, thoughts and feelings. All of these approaches will enhance parent-child positive relationships and attachment, build language development and promote positive peer interactions.

Reid, M. J., Webster-Stratton, C., & Baydar, N. (2004). Halting the development of conduct problems in Head Start children: The effect of parent training. Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology, 33(2), 279-291. Webster-Stratton, C., & Reid, J. (2010). Adapting the Incredible Years, an evidence-based parenting programme, for families involved in the child welfare system. Journal of Children’s Services, 5, 25–42. https://doi.org/10.5042/jcs.2010.0115. The Incredible Teachers book is for day care providers and teachers of young children ages 3-8 years. The book presents a variety of creative classroom management strategies for teachers to use to meet children’s developmental milestones and teach emotional literacy, friendship skills, self-regulation and problem solving skills. Research issues such as program evaluation, consultation regarding research design, assuring program fidelity, and measures to use with IY programs. The purpose of this study was to pilot-test the effect of the Incredible Years (IY) parenting program among Korean American mothers. First-generation Korean American mothers of young children were randomly assigned to the IY intervention or to a control group. Mothers reported on discipline styles (positive, appropriate, and harsh), level of acculturation, and their child's outcomes (behavioral problems and social competence) at pre-, post-, and 1-year follow-up intervals. Measures included the Parent Practices Interview, Eyberg Child Behavior Inventory, Social Competence Scale, and a modified version of the Acculturation Rating Scale for Mexican Americans-II (ARSMA-II). After completing the program, intervention group mothers significantly increased use of positive discipline as compared to control group mothers. Among intervention group mothers, high acculturated mothers significantly increased appropriate discipline whereas low-acculturated mothers significantly decreased harsh discipline. In the 1-year follow-up, intervention group mothers maintained the significant effect for positive discipline. Limitations include the small sample size and the larger number of drop-outs in the control group.

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Gardner, F., Montgomery, P., & Knerr, W. (2015). Transporting evidence-based parenting programs for child problem behavior (age 3–10) between countries: Systematic review and meta-analysis. Journal of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology, 45, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/15374416.2015.1015134.

Promotion of child social competence, emotional regulation, positive attributions, academic readiness, and problem solving

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Cost-effectiveness analyses suggests that the Incredible Years intervention can provide savings to the public sector in the longer term. The Attentive Parenting ® program is a 6-9 session group-based “universal” parenting program. It can be offered to ALL parents to promote their children’s emotional regulation, social competence, problem solving, reading and school readiness. Incredible Years tended to show a mixed effect on positive parenting. This is based on high strength evidence. The findings showed an increased use of positive praise. However parents did not report using more rewards or monitoring behaviours. Pidano, A. E., & Allen, A. R. (2015). The Incredible Years series: A review of the independent research base. Journal of Child and Family Studies, 24, 1898–1916. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-014-9991-7.

Webster-Stratton, C. (2009). Affirming diversity: Multi-cultural collaboration to deliver the Incredible Years parent programs. International Journal of Child Health and Human Development, 2, 17–32. The program has been assessed through multiple randomised controlled trials in the U.S., New Zealand, and Europe. The programs have been found to be effective in strengthening teacher and parent management skills, improving children’s social and emotional competence and school readiness, and reducing behaviour problems. The programme is delivered by accredited therapists, counsellors, social workers, nurses, teachers or physicians. This study examined mediators and moderators of change in conduct problems, in a multi-agency randomized trial of The Incredible Years parenting program. Preschoolers at risk for conduct problems (n=153) were randomly assigned to intervention (n=104) and wait-list (n=49) groups. Boys and younger children, and those with more depressed mothers, tended to show greater improvement in conduct problems post-intervention. Other risk factors (i.e., teen or single parenthood, very low income, high initial levels of problem behavior) showed no predictive effects, implying intervention was at least as successful at helping the most disadvantaged families, compared to more advantaged. Mediator analyses found change in positive parenting skill predicted change in conduct problems. Limitations include the small sample size to conduct moderator and mediator analyses.The sessions include using Video Interaction Guidance, where families reflect on video clips of interactions with their children.