The ETP Approach
Educate Tomorrow’s Parents educates about parenting by helping participants:
- Formulate a vision and life-plan
- Consider their motives and expectations for parenting
- Construct parenting goals
- Anticipate resources
- Learn about children’s needs
- Acquire knowledge and techniques
How We Educate
To engage students and maximize learning opportunities, our instructional methods:
- Employ active learning and interactive teaching techniques
- Reference current health information, statistics, trends, and research results
- Provide a framework for developing personal visions and goals for parenting
- Translate child development theory into plain-speak
- Strengthen parenting skills with real-life applications and assignments
- Inspire and motivate with quotes, true stories, poems, lyrics, cartoons
- Offer a variety of problem-solving strategies to construct personal “toolkits” for parenting
- Engage interest of both genders, reinforcing the role of fathers
- Respect cultural, religious, and socioeconomic differences in parenting
Our Framework for Parenting
It’s vital that students grasp the basic concept of parenting as a decades-long endeavor, with life-long impacts. To this end, we frame our pedagogy around the following tenets:
- Parenting is a long-term project, lasting 18 years at a minimum.
- As with any project, parenting can only be “successful” if there are defined goals.
- Healthy and achievable parenting goals are based on what a parent will do for and with their children, and are not based on what children will do or be for the parent.
- To achieve their goals, parents need to prepare and plan, obtain resources, and track milestones on progress.
- To be effective in their role, parents need to be educated about child health needs, developmental stages, common parenting challenges, legal obligations and rights, parenting tools and techniques.
- Because each person is unique, parenting is a creative endeavor, and the ultimate goals and measures of success will be unique for each parent and child.
What ETP Teaches about Parenting
To ensure students “get it” our approach emphasizes the keys to effective parenting:
- We teach a “Big Picture” perspective of parenting responsibilities and child needs – using a broad, multi-disciplinary approach of health, psychology, economics, and education perspectives of family needs.
- We teach about parent self-care, creative problem-solving, communication skills, anger management, and the importance of family.
- We teach that our ability to be competent parents has a direct effect on our children’s lives, on our own life satisfaction, and on society in general.
- Topics are selected basis of importance and frequency, tailored to an audience’s needs and interests.
