The Positive Parenting Program (Triple P) is an evidence-based seminar that teaches parents with children up to 12 years old techniques to deal with common challenges and improve their parenting skills. According to the Triple P website, the program “gives parents simple and practical strategies to help them build strong, healthy relationships, confidently manage their children’s behavior and prevent problems developing.”
At the Center for Recovery and Wellness (CRW), Triple P has been offered to clients of the Pride Site Residential Addiction Treatment Program since the beginning of 2022. Mia Saunders, Senior Prevention and Wellness Educator, co-facilitates the Triple P class within Pride Site along with Kim Sumner Mayer, Advanced Clinician and Family Services Coordinator, who played a major role in getting the program started at Pride Site.
Mia describes Triple P as a “parenting enhancement program” because there is not one perfect style of parenting or any one manual on how to parent. The program teaches “tools and techniques you can use to enhance your parenting skills that may work for you, depending on the situation you’re going through with the child in that moment.” Each parent and child bring their unique needs to the table so each parent will have different goals and find different strategies useful. The overall goal is to enhance parenting skills in order to more effectively deal with challenges presented by the child.
Triple P breaks its program down into several training manuals according to issues that parents commonly confront: dealing with disobedience, managing fighting and aggression, hassle free shopping, and bedtime scheduling.
The highly specific nature of the curriculum distinguishes Triple P from other parenting programs. For example, when trying to help parents who find it difficult to get their children to bed, “it would be easy to say just turn the lights off or just turn the TV off…with Triple P, they actually get more in depth in terms of the timing and tools that parents use,” Mia said. “If my child is five years old, I might give them three minutes of timeout rather than five minutes…how long will you give them to respond to something you ask them to do?”
According to Mia, the class has been going really well so far and participants are highly engaged. “It has been flowing, participants are super open to discussing different topics and situations they’ve been in with their child. I would say it has taken a great turn because now I see parents trying to give other participants some of the techniques that they use with their child, what works and what doesn’t work. There’s been a lot of conversation surrounding these different tools and techniques, which is great. They’re taking it in and they’re like ‘Okay, I’m actually eager to see what the next activity or lesson is about, I’m eager to learn.’”
“When you first start a class, I don’t know if this is going to be the best or if participants are going to take to it,” Mia says. “I was fifty-fifty in the beginning but then after finishing the first book, the participants are so proactive and engaged within the curriculum that I’m like, ‘Oh wow, I’m eager to teach the next book because it seems like this is a really helpful program.’”
To learn more about Triple P from Mia, you can email her at msaunders@edalliance.org or call her at 646-395-4437.