Making Parent Education Relevant to Vulnerable Parents

Most packaged parent education programmes available in Victoria teach some underlying principles about children’s behaviour and offer specific skills or strategies for managing children. Whilst parent education is seen as an important part of a treatment plan for parents who have abused or neglected their children, these parents are rarely at a stage where they can make use of the information or strategies taught in the packaged programmes. Acutely vulnerable parents, who themselves have been hurt as children, must first heal some of their past before being able to learn and use new approaches to parenting. This paper considers the characteristics of acutely vulnerable parents and proposes some approaches that can be employed to assist these parents reach a point where they can respond to parent education and develop new positive ways relating to their children.