Dear Colleagues and Fellow Parents:

The Center for the Improvement of Child Caring is proud to announce that it is expanding its offerings of the highly acclaimed and popular Systematic Training for Effective Parenting (STEP) programs!

CICC has always facilitated the use of the STEP programs through making training manuals, videotapes, DVDs and parent handbooks available to schools and organizations who conduct the programs for the families that they serve. CICC will now be providing customized instructor training workshops to better prepare individuals and institutions to deliver the programs in as knowledgeable a way as possible.

Below you will find descriptions of the customized instructor training workshops that CICC is offering and how you and your school or agency can bring such workshops to your area.

Below you will also find descriptions of the three STEP programs and the supportive educational materials, all of which can be obtained from CICC.

We encourage you to make use of any or all of these resources in bringing these valuable programs to the families of the children that you and your school or agency serves.

With warmest regards,


Kerby T. Alvy, Ph.D.
CICC Founder and Executive Director

These video-assisted parenting programs have been used successfully with millions of parents. STEP programs are probably the most widely used parenting programs in the United States.

Three versions of the program are available and are designed for parents of differently- aged children:

1. Early Childhood STEP - for parents of children under six.
   
   
2. STEP: Systematic Training for Effective Parenting - the original program for parents of children six to twelve years of age. There is a Spanish language version of this program: STEP Spanish.
   
   
3. STEP/Teen - for parents of children 13-19 years of age.

All versions of the program teach extremely positive approaches to understanding and raising children. The STEP approaches include appreciating that children's behaviors are motivated by a variety of goals, that encouragement for children becoming the best that they can be is extremely important, and that family councils for making decisions for and with children are highly valued.

The authors of these programs include some of the most respected parenting authorities in America, including Drs. Don Dinkmeyer, Sr., Gary D. McKay, Don Dinkmeyer, Jr., Joyce McKay and James S. Dinkmeyer.

The research studies on the effectiveness of the various STEP programs, some of which are available in books written by CICC's founder and director, Dr. Kerby Alvy, (Parent Training Today and Bringing Parenting Education Into the Early Childhood Care and Education System), show that parents are extremely appreciative of what they learn and that their participation in the programs significantly improves their parenting.

Each program version teaches a variety of parenting skills and strategies, like:

• The Goals of Child Misbehavior
• The Courage to be Imperfect
• Effective Listening
• Effective Discipline
• Problem Solving
• Natural and Logical Consequences
• Encouragement

The programs are designed to be taught as classes that meet for seven parenting sessions. One-day seminar versions can also be taught and various segments of the programs can be taught in one-hour parent or lunch-and-learn meetings.

Below are the topics that are covered in each of the seven sessions for each program version.

Early Childhood STEP - For Parents of Children Under Six

• Understanding Young Children
• Understanding Young Children's Behavior
• Building Self-Esteem in the Early Years
• Communicating with Young Children
• Helping Young Children Learn to Cooperate
• Effective Discipline
• Nurturing Emotional and Social Development

STEP: Systematic Training for Effective Parenting - For Parents of Children Six to Twelve Years of Age.

• Understanding Yourself and Your Child
• Understanding Beliefs and Feelings
• Encouraging Your Child and Yourself
• Listening and Talking to Your Child
• Helping Children Learn to Cooperate
• Discipline That Makes Sense
• Choosing Your Approach

STEP/Teen - For Parents of Children 13-19

• Understanding Yourself and Your Teenager
• Changing Your Response to Your Teen
• Communicating Respect and Encouragement
• Encouraging Cooperation and Solving Problems
• Using Consequences to Build Responsibility
• Deciding What To Do - Part I
• Deciding What To Do - Part II

The Center for the Improvement of Child Caring has a long history of providing instructor training workshops in the STEP Programs, beginning in the late 1970s when the original STEP program was used as the best example of the Adlerian Approach to parent training. It was taught to school and agency personnel as part of CICC's national model Personnel for Parent Development Project which was supported by research and training grants from the National Institute of Mental Health.

That highly successful project, which was written about in a 1981 article in the Journal of Community Psychology (Alvy, K.T. and Rubin, H.S., Parent Training and the Training of Parent Trainers, 9, 53-66), revealed that the workshops led to a great deal of assistance and help for the parents that the instructors and their schools and agencies served, as well as leading to other benefits for the agencies and for the instructors themselves. The follow-up research showed that instructors who completed the workshops made six types of uses of what they learned. They

1. Ran parenting classes for groups of parents.
   
   
2. Trained parents on an individual basis as part of other services they were delivering, such as part of counseling sessions.
   
   
3. Delivered community presentations about effective parenting.
   
   
4. Trained other staff to use the skills with their child and parent clients.
   
   
5. Used the skills themselves in relating to colleagues and employers.
   
   
6. Used the skills in relating to their spouses, significant others and their own children.

The Center for the Improvement of Child Caring (CICC) was founded in 1974 by Dr. Kerby T. Alvy and has grown to be one of the nation's largest and most productive nonprofit parenting and parenting education organizations. For more information about CICC's many programs, activities, products and services, go to www.ciccparenting.org, or call toll-free (800) 325-2422.

To sign up for CICC's mailing list, click here.