Since the mid-70's, the Center for the Improvement of Child Caring (CICC) has trained the staff of community departments and agencies, schools and churches to deliver parenting skill-building programs to the families they serve in their local communities.  Over 7000 counselors, social workers, educators, psychologists and parent involvement coordiators from over 2500 agencies and departments nationwide have been trained since that time.  The sponsoring agencies selected one or more of CICC's three national model programs in which to have their staff trained and paid for their staff's enrollment in the professionally-led instructor workshops (see state-by-state listing of agencies and departments that have had staff trained in CICC's parenting programs).

Current Workshops

      Workshops in these programs are available through CICC. Click here for the current schedule of workshops.

Bring A Workshop To Your Community

      To learn what is involved in bringing any of these evidence-based and evidence-informed programs to your area, click here and complete the form. 

Why Are These Programs Being Used Nationwide? 

      Depending on the problems of current concern to communities, these programs have been selected to combat child abuse and neglect, delinquency and drug abuse, and to promote mental health and school achievement.  Because of the fact that two of these programs are designed for and successful with Latino and African American families, they are currently in demand by child welfare and similar agencies to help prevent the overrepresentation of these groups in families who are reported for abuse and neglect.  Various states have adopted the programs for these special reasons. 

How Do Workshop Graduates Use These Programs?

      Research studies where graduates were followed up 6 and 18 months after completing their workshops have found that graduates generally made six types of uses of the programs they learned, and that these 7000 instructors have, as a group, impacted and trained more than one million parents through these various program uses. The six basic uses have been

1. Training parents in groups through classes and seminars,

2. Training individual parents and families one at a time,

3. Training parents as part of other types of services they were receiving, like group therapy or counseling,

4. Using the parenting and human relations skills that are taught in the programs directly, in their relationships with their own clients, colleagues, and family members,

5. Training other staff and volunteers to apply the parenting skills and ideas from the program,

6. Delivering presentations about the programs or about specific skills to agency staff and community groups.

      Some workshop graduates only applied two or three uses with 40 to 50 parents and others, whereas other workshop graduates used all six types and impacted thousands of people over many years. The major determinants of usage have had to do with how well they learned the programs in their workshops, and the extent and quality of the support they received from their sponsoring agencies and schools; the greater the support the more extensive the usage.