Parenting Program

The parenting services provided by PAC are directed toward helping parents develop skills that will enable them to build healthy family dynamics. For many families, there is a need for the development of basic parenting skills as well the need to resolve emotional barriers that threaten their ability to be successful in their parenting.

Our Parenting Program consists of three components:

  1. Nurturing Parenting Skills class: A 12-week class that occurs in a group setting and is based on the Nurturing Skills for Families program developed by Stephen J. Bavolek, Ph.D. "Nurturing Parenting is a philosophy that supports children being raised in a caring home that nourishes their self worth, promotes their sense of personal empowerment and cooperation, makes appropriate developmental expectations of them, teaches children that compassion is a family moral and value and generally treats children, and everyone else for that matter, in respectful, non-violent, dignified ways."

  2. Compassion Workshop: A 12-week therapeutic group based on a program developed by Steven Stosny, Ph.D. The material provides clients the opportunity to break family legacies of violence, abuse and neglect and to create healthy nurturing homes and families. Compassion Workshop works with parents to resolve emotional barriers to parenting that arise from past hurts and to make interpersonal changes in the areas of communication, power struggles, releasing resentment, and establishing and maintaining healthy relationships.

  3. Parent-Child Observation (PCO) Sessions: These 30-minute sessions allow parents to interact with their children in one of our family rooms while be observed by PAC staff through a two-way mirror. This allows our staff to assist parents in the application of the skills they are learning in their classes/groups.