Abstract

Coping skills provide a resource for tackling stress in everyday situations, including those relating to parenting. The aim of this article is to establish whether parents who experienced a 10-hour universal social emotional parenting program — Families Coping (FC) — benefit through increased productive coping strategies, decreased nonproductive coping strategies, and increased parent wellbeing, within a positive parenting framework. It is also of interest to see whether gender and/or partner attendance makes a difference in program outcomes such as coping styles and wellbeing. The data set combined two groups of parents (N = 23) of preschool-aged children from an early learning centre in inner-metropolitan Melbourne in 2013 and 2014 who undertook the FC parenting program. A mixed methods design was employed, where parents completed pre- and post-program questionnaires on coping and wellbeing. Results were considered with respect to gender and partner attendance. A one-way repeated-measures multiple analysis of variance (RM-MANOVA) showed a significant increase in one productive parenting style (Dealing with the Problem), a significant decrease in nonproductive parent coping, and a significant increase in parent wellbeing. Comparison of results between gender and partner attendance groups showed minimal differences in program effectiveness. Qualitative data mostly confirmed the key findings.