Be Good Parents (Parent Education)

Parenting not only acts as an important drive for child development, also serves as one of the key determinants for family relationships. Emotion management is the essence of parenting competence. Anger, fear, joy, distress and enthusiasm are involved in the parenting process. Negative emotions of parents are associated with child abuse; while positive emotions are related to warm parenting, and promote children's early attachment with parents. In addition, parental negative emotion consistently predicts behavior problems of children. For example, children who are exposed to higher levels of maternal negative feelings, such as anger, have more difficulty regulating their own negative feelings and have greater difficulty getting along with others.

Emotion management training has been shown effective in improving parenting skills, promoting parent-child interaction, and preventing child abuse. For example, parents who attended anger control workshops reported less unrealistic expectations for their children, fewer conflicts with children, and less domestic violence toward spouse and children. However, these interventions were tested in Western culture where there is much less emphasis on academic performance of children. In addition, such interventions usually contain complex content and last for months.

The investigators developed a parenting intervention tailored for Chinese parents and reported its effectiveness in a randomized controlled trial. In this empirical study, 412 Hong Kong mothers of children aged 6 to 8 years old were randomized into the parenting arm or the control arm. The results showed that the parenting arm reported greater increase in the use of emotion management found that it was effective in increasing emotion management skills and enhancing the parent-child relationship. Participants in the parenting arm also reported lower negative affect, and higher positive affect, satisfaction with the parent-child relationship, and family harmony, compared to the control arm. The investigators' findings provide evidence for a sustainable, preventive, culturally appropriate, and cognitive behavioral-based parenting program in the community population. Considering unique dynamics of cross-boundary and new arrival families, a short and simple intervention on emotion management would benefit these parents to perform better parenting. Therefore based on the investigators' promising findings in the community setting, this proposed program aim to modify this parenting program to the needs of parents of the cross-boundary and new arrival children.