The Incredible Years Pre-school Parent Programme is for parents of children 3-6 years old, who would like to learn more about how to support their children’s emotions by building strong foundations in order to encourage positive behaviours.

Dr Kate Rhee, Clinical Psychologist, led the group through the workshop by giving an overview of the programme, and teaching the skills to facilitate the group successfully. Our first day focused on the IY principles of supporting children through child directed play and how this promotes positive relationships. This includes teaching descriptive commenting, academic social and emotional coaching. On day two we moved up the ‘Parenting Pyramid’ to learn about praise, rewards, routines, rules and limit setting. We did a lot of parent/child role play in order to maximize our results in a group, which pushed a lot of us out of our comfort zone(!) but really developed our learning. By day three we were on to covering how to handle misbehaviour, ‘time out to calm down’, and logical consequences. We talked a lot about problem solving in groups and how to engage and evaluate.

I learned a lot about my own parenting and would recommend this course to anyone with children of this age. The training was so helpful in identifying strategies to help problem solve with our parents and to this end, I will be beginning hosting Incredible Years groups in February.