Power to the People

In an earlier blog I mentioned how much I enjoyed travelling by train. That was obviously before I made a journey that involved taking 8 – yes 8 – trains in one day to travel a mere 60 miles. The journey to Colchester in Essex necessitated me taking 4 trains there and four trains back at the astronomical cost of £32.00 and the return journey took 3 hours! That is 20 miles an hour. This meant that I drove on the subsequent days – a journey that took 90 minutes each way and cost in the region of £8.00 a day. Admittedly the M25 is a nightmare but on this occasion the car beat the train hands down. So when I say I love the train what I actually mean is that I love trains that I can catch at the station at the end of my road and takes me directly to my destination, which also happens to be a short stroll from the station, and cost less than a cup of coffee.

Colchester is a nice town. It is an army town in Essex and among its claims to fame is that it is the oldest recorded Roman town in Britain. As I said it is a mere 60 miles from London and the route I drove in on took me past the lovely houses that form part of its ‘posh’ district, Lexton. This is where I spotted the ‘Woodlands Residential Home for Ladies’ which I have earmarked as a possible home for me when I have one foot in the grave. It is for ‘discerning ladies’ which I am sure that one day I will be.

My visit to Colchester was not to look at possible care homes for me in my old age but to be trained as a facilitator for the Incredible Years programme. This is an aspect of my new job that I love. The amount of training that I have had over the last couple of months is phenomenal. I am being trained as a SENCO, EYFS practitioner, Facilitator and next week alone I have three more training days. My only concern is when I will get the time to actually do my work. It seems the further up your career you go the less time you have to actually do any ‘hands on’ work. How I yearn for the halcyon days of being a ‘primary helper’. That has got to be the best job in the world. It is such a pity it is so badly paid and ‘non professional.’

The ‘Incredible Years’ is the brain child of Dr. Carolyn Webster-Stratton. Dr Webster-Stratton is Professor and Director of the Parenting Clinic at the University of Washington. She has developed the Incredible Years Programme to promote children’s social competence, emotional regulation and problem solving skills and reduce their behaviour problems. The aim of the programme is to help parents and teachers provide young children with a strong emotional, social and academic foundation so as to achieve the longer term goal of reducing the development of depression, school drop out, violence, drug abuse and delinquency in later years.

It has been running in the UK for several years now and was initially trialled in Wales:

Ruling the roost

The Incredible Years parenting programme is being held up by ministers as a model of good practice -Laura Smith -The Guardian, Wednesday 20 September 2006

It's Wednesday morning at the Plas Pawb community centre on a housing estate in Caernarfon, north Wales, and seven mothers sit anxiously in a circle. They have come for the first week of a parenting course and are wondering what to expect.
Sitting among them is Eilir Jones, the softly-spoken Sure Start health visitor who will lead the group. She goes around the room, gently asking each woman why she has come. They start off embarrassed, unsure, but gain confidence from each other as the answers spill out: sons and daughters with learning or speech difficulties; kids who are violent and have problems controlling their tempers; sons missing their fathers after a difficult divorce; children who won't do what they are told. By the time each mother has spoken, the relief in the room is palpable. "A lot of mothers have so much on their plates," says Jones during the tea break. "They might have one child with physical or behavioural problems. They might have a difficult relationship with their partner. That's a lot to cope with. It helps to know that other parents are going through some of the same things." The course at Plas Pawb is just one of dozens of parenting courses across Wales that use the Incredible Years (IY) approach, pioneered by Carolyn Webster-Stratton, an educational psychologist at the University of Washington, and introduced to the UK in 1997 by Dr Judy Hutchings, an NHS clinical psychologist and research director at the University of Wales, Bangor. The central tenet of the programme is its collaborative nature. Parents are not told what to do, but are encouraged to work it out among themselves through group discussion. Positivity is another theme. Despite the serious problems faced by those who attend the programmes run at Sure Start centres or through child and adolescent mental health services, the first six weeks of the 12-week programme are spent not on addressing problem behaviour, but on helping parents build a positive relationship with their children. Listening and talking, playing, praising and rewarding form the basis of these early classes and it's only in the final weeks that parents are given strategies to deal with bad behaviour, including time out, loss of privileges and ignoring. Nicola Hilton, 35, from Tregarth, north Wales, finished the IY course earlier this year. "I remember feeling very frustrated in the first couple of weeks," she says. "My son has ADHD [attention deficit hyperactivity disorder] and the course was a last resort. I didn't want to come here and play Thomas the bloody Tank Engine. I wanted someone with a white coat to sort things out. But it's been an absolute turnaround. Things aren't perfect now, but to actually be in control and know you are the boss and for that child to know their boundaries is important." Hilton is not the only parent to report such a positive outcome. An evaluation of the approach in 11 Sure Start areas in 2003-04 found that children whose parents attended at least one session showed a 42% reduction in problem behaviours compared with a 7% reduction in the control group. And this was among three- to four-year-old children referred by health visitors because they were considered at risk of developing conduct disorder due to significant behavioural difficulties.
"The parents we saw had children who had incredible tantrums, were being aggressive and sometimes violent," says Tracey Bywater, research officer in Hutchings' department at the University of Wales. "They were climbing the walls. To go back to the same family a few months later and hear them say they can take their little boy shopping where they couldn't before, and that their relationship with their partner is better because they're less stressed out and that they are actually having fun with their children - it's lovely."
Such evidence has not gone unnoticed. The Welsh assembly in April this year unveiled plans to roll out the parenting programme to every local authority area in Wales. One of the other aspects of the scheme, in which teachers are trained to use the IY methods with reception and primary school pupils, was adopted by Gwynedd Education Department in 2001 and teachers trained in aspects of the scheme will be in place in every primary school in the county by 2008.
Central government is also taking notice. The government's action plan on social exclusion, published last week, praises the programme for its "significant results", including better parenting and a reduction in problem child behaviours. IY was recommended in the recently published National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence guidelines for the treatment of conduct disorder and is being examined by the Department for Education and Skills for possible roll-out elsewhere in the UK.
Hutchings says she has lost count of the number of government briefings she has attended in recent months. "I had breast cancer two years ago and could do with retiring really," she says. "But it's quite hard to give up when you know you are doing something that could make a difference to family's lives."
While welcoming the government's renewed commitment to early intervention, Hutchings and her team are wary of the rhetoric about identifying problem children "pre-birth", which caused some outcry last month when Tony Blair lent his support. "There are risk factors such as low income, but you have to be careful because it's not predetermined," says Bywater. "You can't, in my opinion, say that just because they come from a single parent family - which my kids do - they are going to be trouble."
Judith Roberts, 34, from Deiniolen, north Wales, finished the parenting course earlier this year and believes it should be offered universally. "After a couple of years of having groups of people looking at you while you are grappling with your child at school and in the supermarket when he is going nuts, you feel so alone," she says. "This group makes you realise it's not just you and reminds you that you are a good mother. I'm a lot more confident now. I'm looking into going back to work and getting on with my life because it seemed to be on hold for so many years."


How The Incredible Years parent training programme works - DIANNE SPENCER - femail.co.uk

The Incredible Years programmes have been developed by Professor Carolyn Webster-Stratton, director of the Parenting Clinic at the University of Washington, to help parents deal with problem children. The long-term goal of this award-winning series of programmes is to prevent delinquency, drug abuse, and violence - the all-too common outcomes for children whose antisocial behaviour goes uncorrected.
Short-term, they focus on building the parent-child relationship by encouraging parents to become more involved with their children, teaching them how to play with them, praise and reward them, set limits and handle misbehaviour.
'Without early family treatment, aggressive behaviour in children 'crystallises' by the age of eight, making future learning and behavioural problems less responsive to treatment and more likely to become chronic,' says Professor Webster-Stratton.
'Yet recent projections suggest that fewer than ten per cent of young children who need treatment for conduct problems ever receive it.'
The Incredible Years programmes are designed to help parents learn how to:
• increase the amount of praise they give their children and reduce the use of criticism and negative commands.
• set limits by replacing spanking and harsh discipline with non-violent discipline techniques and increased monitoring of children.
• feel more confident about themselves and their parenting skills.
• solve problems and communicate positively with their family.
• gain their children's cooperation, leading to a more positive relationship.
For children, the benefits can include:
• reduced conduct problems;
• a decrease in negative behavior and conflict with parents at home;
• decreased aggression and disruptive behavior in the classroom;
• better social skills and improved ability to make friends;
• greater understanding of their own and other's feelings;
• better ability to deal with conflict;
• improved willingness to learn, and greater cooperation with teachers.

I disagree with Dianne Spencer in as much as i think the programme is designed to deal with problem parents rather than problem children. In fact the label 'problem' is a misleading one, or rather the problem is in the parenting methods used rather than in the individuals concerned. It is all to do with rethinking what we do, why we do it, what it is we actually want and making changes in things that are unhelpful, unsuccessful and sometimes damaging. The trainer was excellent, she really knew her stuff and it was probably the first bit of training I have been on where I had no trouble staying awake for the afternoon session. The only downside is that the ‘manual’ costs nearly £2000 dollars (including package from the US of A) and to become an accredited practitioner will cost us Londoners (the Eseex cohort get a discount) around £500. Since the training cost the LA around £700 per person this seems a bit excessive. And come Wednesday (the Big Spending Review Day) I doubt there will be any money left in the pot for enabling this to be rolled out in any significant way. I imagine it will mean, in the real word, us trained but uncredited facilitators, offering bits of advice to stressed out parents and teachers in a luke warm manner – ‘I say, have you considered playing with you child? No? well give it go and when I next see you I tell you about setting limits. See Ya’.

God, I hate sounding cynical. There has been a lot of praising over the last few days as part of the training was to praise others and yourself. So I have had a very positive few days, mainly being told that I have nice eyes, that my hair is a lovely colour and I that am ‘laid back’. What does that mean? ‘Laid Back’? That I take things in my stride? That I am easy going? Or did they all spot my innate Acceptance? My new work colleagues in particular commented on my ‘laid backiness’. I can only hope it isn’t a nice way of saying lazy. My new team has a reputation for being very hardworking, arriving at the office early, leaving the office late, juggling a thousand things at once and ‘demonstrating impact and achieving outcomes’. This does not bode well with my ‘laid back’ image. I will have to work on being unlaid and forward.

Image is a funny thing. Take Bloggers for instance:

I heard Andrew Marr speaking about Bloggers.

Marr, says ‘Most citizen journalism strikes me as nothing to do with journalism at all. A lot of bloggers seem to be socially inadequate, pimpled, single, slightly seedy, bald, cauliflower-nosed young men sitting in their mother's basements and ranting. They are very angry people. The country is full of very angry people. Many of us are angry people at times. ‘But the so-called citizen journalism is the spewings and rantings of very drunk people late at night.’ Marr does however concede that some Bloggers do have something valid to say - ‘It is fantastic at times but it is not going to replace journalism. Most of the blogging is too angry and too abusive. Terrible things are said online because they are anonymous. People say things online that they wouldn't say in person.

I do like the idea of ‘Citizen Journalism’. I would not say that the Rat Diaries are a form of journalism, far from it. The RD are simply a diary that is written on a blog and hopefully one day someone will read it. My daughter has just started college and mentioned to her fellow students that her mum blogs. She told me they were all really impressed by this and asked her what her mum blogged about. ‘I don’t know’ she admitted ‘I haven’t read it’.

The blogs that are Citizen Journalism, if well written and knowledgeable, are every bit as valid as 'Freelance Journalism', 'On Newspapers Payroll Journalism' or any other type of jounrnalism you care to name. I have read blogs that far surpass anything you could read in a newspaper – even the broadsheets. I have read blogs that are informative, reportive, reflective and impartial. I have read blogs that are intelligent, emotive, passionate and thought provoking. I have read blogs that are funny, sad, personal and touching. I have learned things from reading blogs, been inspired to research further, angered and moved to tears. I have read blogs that I don’t understand and blogs that put into words of clarity the chaotic thoughts that have been spinning in my head. All the things that a good newspaper or a news programme or a well made documentary can do and more. Bravo Bloggers and Citizen Journalism.

Power to the People!