The Incredible Years: Palm Beach County

The Incredible Years series is a set of comprehensive curricula targeting children age 0 to 10 years old and their parents and teachers. The curricula are designed to work jointly to promote emotional and social competence and to prevent, reduce, and treat children's behavioral and emotional problems. The series includes programs for parent training, child training, and teacher training.

The Children's Services Council of Palm Beach County is implementing the parent training program, which includes the Baby Parent Program for parents of infants 0-12 months (8-10 sessions), the Toddlers Parent Program for parents of children ages 1-3 (12-13 sessions), and the Preschool BASIC Parent Program for parents of children ages 3-6 (18-20 sessions). This series focuses on strengthening parenting competencies (monitoring, positive discipline, confidence) and fostering parents' involvement in children's school experiences in order to reduce conduct problems and promote children's social, emotional and academic competencies.

The program aims to promote social, emotional, and academic competence and to prevent children from developing conduct problems.

The Incredible Years series has been shown to increase positive parenting practices and family communication while reducing children's conduct problems.

Six randomized control group evaluations of the parenting series by the program developer and colleagues at the University of Washington, as well as five independent replications by other investigators, has shown significant results in the following findings:

-Increases in positive parenting such as praise and reduced use of criticism and negative commands.
-Increases in parent use of effective limit-setting, replacing spanking and harsh discipline with non-violent discipline techniques and increased monitoring of children.
-Reductions in parental depression and increases in parental self-confidence.
-Increases in positive family communication and problem-solving.
-Reduced conduct problems in children's interactions with parents and increases in their positive affect and compliance with parental commands.