EFFECTIVE PARENTING:

For Parents of Advantaged Children

Effective Parenting, developed by Karen L. Rancourt, Ph.D., is a three-hour program designed specifically for financially comfortable parents of young and pre-teen children. Based on her 20 years of working with financial services professionals as a management consultant, coupled with her ten years of teaching and writing experience as an educator, Karen has purposefully targeted affluent parents with young children.

Why the focus on these parents? It would be easy to assume that children of parents who are financially prosperous will fare their teen years more easily than, or at least as well as, their less advantaged teen counterparts. However, the latest research paradoxically establishes that these children are at significantly greater risk of developing serious emotional problems precisely because of their privileged circumstances. Teens from affluent, well-educated families are less happy, less confident, and prone to higher rates of depression and suicide attempts than are their less affluent counterparts.

Clearly there is an urgent call to action if these disturbing findings are to decrease with future privileged teenagers. An important first step is for their parents to understand their parenting practices – that is, why they and their spouse do what they do as parents. There are no rights or wrongs in this program, there are no do’s and don’t’s. Rather, Karen accepts in non-judgmental and non-critical ways each parent’s style and his/her ways of interacting with, rewarding and disciplining his/her children.

Specifically, Karen helps parents decide:

• which parenting practices they want to keep using and build on
• if they want to make any changes in how they parent
• how they might make changes in ways that are natural and comfortable for them
• ways in which they can be more accepting of and accommodating to their spouse’s different practices

Parents benefit when they understand and respect each other’s parenting preferences. Their children learn important life lessons when they see their parents aligned on some parenting issues and when they see their parents disagree and address their differences about other parenting issues in respectful and productive ways. It's not about parents presenting a United Front as much as an Honest Front that reflects each parent’s well-thought-out style and preferences.