Planning and conducting effective parent education programs for families is one focus area for WSU Cooperative Extension family living faculty.
Since January 1997, more than 1100 divorcing and separating parents have participated in court-mandated “Children Cope With Divorce” parent education classes, taught in English and Spanish by trained community paired male-female teams in Chelan, Douglas, Stevens, Ferry, and Pend Oreille counties.
End of class evaluations elicit such comments as the following from the participants: “I learned not to put children in the middle of conflicts and how to co-parent better,” “I learned to focus on my child as much as possible and stay neutral,” and “I learned to take time to see things the way my children will see them and to make sure to tell them the divorce is not their fault.”
Follow-up surveys among parents who took the class in Pend Oreille County found that the majority better understood the importance of the other parent in their children’s lives. They also found a way to communicate more effectively with the other parent and spoke more positively or in a more neutral way to their children about the other parent.
WSU Cooperative Extension Snohomish County, the Everett Naval Station Family Service Center and the YMCA have collaborated three times during 1999 to offer “Parenting Young Children for Navy Families” classes. The classes teach appropriate guidance approaches to deal with child development issues unique to military families.
Cooperative Extension’s Sheliah Johnson was involved with the “Open Doors for Families Conference” held in Seattle, June 2-4, 1999, which attracted 800 people from five Pacific Northwest states (Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Alaska and Montana). Cooperative Extension educators, along with other professionals throughout the state, are providing leadership in Family Support Washington, a family support initiative partially funded by the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation, which will train “trainers” throughout the state of Washington during calendar year 2000.
A member of the WSU-CE Parent and Life Education faculty, Drew Betz, was part of the planning team as well as one of the in-studio guests for a national satellite conference for parent educators produced at Washington State University. This satellite program was produced in cooperation with faculty from four other universities—Iowa State, the University of Delaware, Texas A & M, and Kansas State University. The program was watched in 149 sites in 38 different states and the District of Columbia.
It was awarded the Gold Award for Distance Education and Instructional Design for non-credit Educational Projects by the Agricultural Communicators in Education in the summer of 1999 and also received a First Place Regional Award for Educational Technology from the National Extension Association for Family and Consumer Sciences.
Closer to home, 365 people, including 327 females and 38 males, attended the 5th Annual Regional Update for Parent Educators, a WSU-CE sponsored parenting conference in Wenatchee. A wide variety of ethnic groups and low-income parents and agencies serving this audience also participated.
The goal of the 1999 conference was to increase parent educators’ knowledge and skills about issues facing parents in today’s changing world and to help them plan and conduct more effective, high-quality parent education programs.
