Be Good Parents (Parent Education)

Overview

The collaborator has its vision as "To have children, individuals, families and migrants across countries live in dignity and harmony, and be contributing members to a just, humane and caring society." Parents are very significant in the families as they need nurturing, discipline, teaching, monitoring, and managing their children as well as their families. Capable and competent parents bring good child outcome and happy family. The investigators planned to serve targeted parents in two areas as 1. Emotion management and 2. Information on community resource. In the first set, the participants are expected to improve their emotion management leading to a more effective parenting. In the second set, the participants would acquire more information that enables them to better use the community resources. To work closely with the collaborator, and based on the previous results of an effective parenting intervention, the investigators will modify the intervention to tailor the needs of targeted parents. The objectives are: 1. After completing the parenting intervention, 150 participants will, 1.1. To increase participants' emotion management strategies by 20%, 1.2. To enhance positive affect by 10%, 1.3. To decrease negative affect by 10%, 1.4. To enhance satisfaction with the parent-child relationship by 10%, 1.5. To increase subjective happiness by 8%, 1.6. To enhance family harmony by 5%, These levels of positive effects of the program were projected from the investigators' published findings. 2. After joining the information sessions about education, health care, housing, employment, and community facilities, another 150 participants will, 2.1 To know more information of Hong Kong by 50%, 2.2 To know more information of Mainland China by 50%, 2.3 To use more community resources either in Hong Kong or Mainland China by 50%. To study the effectiveness of parenting intervention, the investigators proposed to use a randomized controlled trial (RCT) that is a type of scientific study to reduce bias. Participants in this project will be randomly allocated to either the emotional management group or the information group. As the information group has no focus on parenting, participants would show no significant improvement in emotion management strategies or satisfaction with the parent-child relationship, etc. Meanwhile, participants in the parenting intervention would show no significant improvement in knowledge about either Hong Kong or Mainland China.

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.