Parenting education without borders: Web-based outreach

This chapter has reviewed the need for family interventions to improve developmental outcomes for high-risk children. It also reviewed the 30-year history of studies on Strengthening Families Program (SFP) including mandated cultural adaptations and results in many countries. SFP is effective because both parents and children participate in two-hour weekly family group sessions for 10-14 weeks. It was developed as a 14-session selective prevention intervention for high-risk elementary school children of parents with substance use disorders (SUD's) on a National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) research grant. SFP's goals are to reduce child maltreatment, substance abuse, delinquency, and school failure by training parents to improve their positive parenting, parental efficacy, and parental-child involvement. One critical core element in SFP is that every implementation is culturally and locally adapted by the implementing agency and facilitators, called group leaders. SFP has been culturally adapted for many different ethnic and cultural groups worldwide and the program has been widely disseminated.