Can Changing Parental Knowledge, Dysfunctional Expectations and Attributions, and Emotion Regulation Improve Outcomes for Children?

Introduction The broader parent training literature has increasingly incorporated explicit consideration of cognitive and affective elements of the parenting role in explanations of parenting difficulties and in descriptions of how to intervene successfully with parents. To some extent, the notion that parents need to understand what is age-appropriate to develop reasonable expectations of children has been assumed. However, the evidence supporting the idea that early childhood parenting programs that explicitly target cognitive and affective changes result in better outcomes than more behaviourally skills-based programs is less clear. The present paper examines the conceptual and empirical basis for strategies such as increasing parents’ knowledge of development norms, reducing ageinappropriate expectations or dysfunctional attributions, and increasing parents’ capacity to regulate their own emotions.