The Parenting Journey is a series of innovative parent education curricula developed by The Family Center and designed to support parents in making better choices about how to successfully raise their children and live their lives.

Unlike traditional parent education programs, The Parenting Journey curricula was created by family therapists, not parent educators. It is not a didactic “how to” class, but instead focuses insightfully on people’s lives, and how their past and present experiences influence their parenting styles, abilities and choices. Through our programs parents come to understand that our histories don’t make us who we are, we get to choose who we are and how we’ll act once we put our “stories” in perspective. Ultimately the series is designed to help parents become “experts” on themselves, their strengths and what they need to do to successfully raise their children.

The journey mirrors the best of what it takes to create healthy family interactions, a shared meal, meaningful conversations, skill-building, probing questions, and careful attention to each person. Parents explore the story of their lives and learn to set goals that are informed by the new insights they’ve developed.

Participants can be any parents who are interested in knowing what pushes their buttons and who want to learn how to respond more effectively to their children. Currently we focus on the neediest of families and children but ultimately we would like to serve a much broader audience. We know that parenting is a tough job no matter what ones life circumstances are.

Children can’t raise themselves; they need the guidance and support of strong and caring parents. Unfortunately too many parents are falling down on the job and their children are paying the price. We’re in the business of training family workers – those charged with shaping up our most vulnerable families – providing them with the tools they need to help parents break cycles of family dysfunction and dissatisfaction so that they can raise, support and nurture their children.

The Family Center has spent the past several years working with consultants from the Institute for Community Health (ICH), a collaboration among three Massachusetts health care systems with a team of experts focused on advancing community health research, receiving guidance and hands-on assistance in creating a customized evaluation tool and a centralized data collection system for our Parenting Journey program.

For two and a half years, The Family Center has made use of our self-designed Parenting Journey Part I Scale (PJS) exclusively to measure the effects of The Parenting Journey on participants. Our self-designed PJS instrument combines both validated and non-validated sub-scales. We have translated the PJS into the three languages most frequently used for our Parenting Journey groups: Spanish, Haitian Creole and Brazilian Portuguese. As part of our outcomes process, we enter the raw data from the completed surveys into our Family Support Database, and the data is then analyzed with support from our outcomes and evaluation consultants at The Institute for Community Health. The PJS is given to participants as a pre- and post-group survey. Results reveal that there are statistically significant increases in all seven of the goal areas:

In addition to the quantitative results above, we have embedded a qualitative evaluation tool within the PJS that consists of three self-reflective, open-ended questions for participants to answer. The questions allow us to hear directly from participants in their own words about how the program has impacted them. The qualitative questions are given at the last session of the group. Highlights from our qualitative evaluation tool include parents self-reporting:

To date, we have introduced nearly 1,000 workers from over 400 agencies and schools to The Parenting Journey™ and its parent-centered philosophy of change - positively impacting the lives of over 24,000 children and families. Over the next five years we want to expand the number of families that have access to our programs. We plan to train and support an additional 1,500 family support workers and supply them with the tools and resources they need to positively impact the lives of over 72,000 additional children and families.

Our innovative parent education series is currently being utilized at over 250 New York based agencies, schools, churches and community centers.

The Parenting Journey curricula series offers an entire self sufficient program, complete with evaluation tools and protocols. Group leaders are given tools to make it a success. There is a well thought out curriculum and five days of training as well as technical assistance in preparation to deliver the program. Without this it cannot be done. So, in fact, in order to have this effective service directly benefiting children and parents, people must be trained, much as teachers are trained. Your support helps us to subsidize the cost of training for the human service providers enrolled at The Institute. To make a donation to The Parenting Journey Training Institute, please click here