About Parenting Matters

Can good parenting be taught? Does “parent training” make any difference? When Dr Clare Bailey, a GP and mother of four, needed help she decided to look for something that really worked. Clare had an advantage over most parents in this situation - her mother, Veira, was a leading NHS child psychiatrist. Veira introduced Clare to a huge body of research done, both here and in the USA, into positive parenting. The essential message of all this research is very simple: the best way to improve children’s behaviour is to reward the behaviour you want to see more of, ignore the behaviour you don’t want. This is the reverse of what parents often, inadvertently do. When children are behaving well we ignore them, leave them to get on with things. Only when they fight, shout, scream, whine do we give them our attention. She was so inspired by what she discovered that she trained in a CBT (Cognitive Behaviour Therapy) based parenting program and set up Parenting Matters to share the skills with other parents. Her husband Michael Mosley (BBC TV director and presenter) was so impressed by the benefits that he set up Little Angels, the hit TV parenting series. For three years Parenting Matters gave classes to small groups of parents in which they learned not only how to improve their children’s behaviour but also how to play with them in ways that create really strong bonds; she showed how encouragement and praise can improve their self esteem and social skills; and she taught well tested methods for improving a child’s problem solving skills, which lead to more confident, independent children. It soon became clear thatthe demand was such that these skills needed to be taught to many more people than could be handled in small classes or one-to-one. Clare is therefore developing an online course to provide these skills that will go live early in 2019.

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