Mental health problems are major impediments to educational attainment for children and adolescents worldwide. While parents hold high hopes for their children’s success in school, few parents have access to information about brain development and positive parenting skills that could help them send their children off to school each day ready to learn. When a mother and father learn to parent with self-control and engage in calm one-on-one time with a child, the child learns self-control and is more likely to arrive at school feeling centered and able to focus.

A partnership among the University of Washington Schools of Medicine and Public Health, the Ethiopian Community of Seattle and the District Health Authority of N. Mzimba, Malawi led by Ann Vander Stoep, PhD, piloted a six-hour Positive Parenting Workshop in 2018. Parents of school-aged children learned basic brain science (“survival brain” and “self-control brain”) and simple positive parenting skills that are fundamental components of evidence-based parenting interventions (“one-on-one time,” “getting to calm,” “connect before correct”). The curriculum was delivered in local language (Amharic and Chitumbuka) and incorporated skits and role-plays from culturally relevant parenting challenges. The workshops were delivered within community settings (primary school and community center) by community members at low cost. Dr. Vander Stoep, Laura Kastner, PhD, and Elizabeth McCauley, PhD, trained community leaders to facilitate the workshops.

The Seattle workshop had 18 Amharic-speaking parent attendees and the Malawi workshop had 60 Chitumbuka-speaking parent attendees. Between workshop sessions, parents used skills tracking calendars and stickers to document their use of new skills and shared positive parenting stories when they reconvened for the second workshop session. They completed simple pre- and post-tools that queried their brain science and positive parenting knowledge and participated in a group debrief session. The pilot showed remarkable consistency in both sites in the process of program implementation and in the content of the curriculum across very different settings. The evaluation results demonstrated the enthusiasm that parents, living half-way across the globe, had to devote time to improving their parenting, to understand neuroscience, and to learn positive parenting skills.

The UW faculty members and their Ethiopian Community Center partners held a second round of workshops for a new group of Amharic-speaking parents in August 2019 and are currently hoping to implement positive parenting workshops for Amharic- and Tigrinya-speaking mothers residing in King County shelters. This year, a Community-Oriented Public Health Practice graduate student is working with the team to create a Public Health Parenting Workshop Toolkit for people interested in offering the workshop within their communities. The team’s work has been funded by generous local donors, including Dr. Edyth Phillips, a recently retired local psychiatrist who trained and worked at the University of Washington Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences.