Improving Preschoolers' Mental Health: A RCT Assessing Two Parenting Programs

The How-to Parenting Program focuses on how expectations, rules, and values are better communicated (vs. what rules ought to be). It includes skills related to the three components of authoritative parenting, namely affiliation, structure, and autonomy support. 1) Affiliation: Parents learn how to listen and respond to their children in a way that helps them feel accepted unconditionally. 2) Structure: Parents learn how to communicate expectations, give feedback, follow through, and use joint problem-solving in a factual, non-judgmental way. 3) Autonomy support: Parents learn how to validate emotions, encourage initiatives, and free children from roles. Finally, the How-to program can be endorsed by parents of various cultural backgrounds, as suggested by the large number (\> 30) of languages in which the material is translated. This advantage is crucial in ethnically diverse regions such as Canada.

Nobody's Perfect is delivered in family resource centers across Canada to support parents of infants and preschoolers. Its focus is on developing parents' capacity to problem solve, providing child development information, and helping parents recognize their strengths and find their own positive ways to interact with their children. It thus does not teach specific parenting skills and does not suggest specific rules to put into practice in the home-environment.