Imagine buying a house without looking inside. Consider the mentality of a home buyer who doesn’t know whether to worry more about the state of the foundations or the color of the kitchen counter-tops.

A recent article in the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology suggests that those purchasing parent education programs (be it governments, private institutions, or individuals) set about it as blindly.

They know that parent education programs generally help parents to improve children’s behavior and overall adjustment and that some programs do a better job than others. What they don’t know is what makes the better programs, well, better? In other words, what are the active ingredients?

To answer this question, a group of US researchers, led by Jennifer Wyatt Kaminski of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, conducted a meta-analysis to synthesize the results of 77 published evaluations of programs designed to enhance parenting skills. By doing so, the programs ultimately aimed to improve behavior and adjustment in children up the age of seven.

The research team found that the aspects of the programs most consistently associated with improvements in parenting and child behavior were:

• teaching parents emotional communication skills (such as active listening and reduction of criticism and sarcasm)
• teaching parents to interact positively with children (such as showing enthusiasm and attention for good behavior and letting the child take the lead in play activities)
• teaching parents to discipline consistently (such as responding to a problem behavior every time it occurs in the same fashion)
• having parents practice new skills with their children in the parenting class.

Kaminski and her colleagues note that only one of these four program components has to do with discipline. The other three focus on skills needed to enhance the parent-child relationship in general. Such information is critical if the people buying parent education programs are going to make informed decisions. Moreover, those designing new programs can build on these findings by only including active ingredients and not waste time and money on approaches that do not demonstrate consistent effects.

• Summary of “A Meta-analytic Review of Components Associated with Parent Training Program Effectiveness” by Jennifer Wyatt Kaminski, Linda Anne Valle, Jill H. Filene, and Cynthia L. Boyle in Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 2008, Volume 36, Issue 4, pp 567-589.