Overview the Parenting Calendar, Effective Parenting, and PSAS.
What Is The Parenting Calendar?
Thanks to the Horizons Foundation, this grant-funded calendar lists all the parenting courses, lectures, workshops, conferences, parent coaches and mentors, support groups, and facilitator trainings that we are aware of in the central Puget Sound area, as well as online resources. We also list parenting resources for special topics, such as “Adoption,” or “Spanish-Language Families.”
We publish the calendar quarterly and update it frequently between issues. If you teach parenting, let us know and we’ll list your courses, Adlerian or otherwise.
We are most familiar with Adlerian-based events and services, which appear in shaded boxes throughout the calendar. We do not endorse specific events other than those we sponsor, and we encourage you to check the approach and qualifications of specific presenters.
Our goal is to help people improve their family relationships so that family life will be more satisfying and individuals in the family will have an improved sense of well-being. We hope you will find The Parenting Calendar useful and will let others know about it!
What Is Effective Parenting?
We particularly encourage you to select a course or support group that focuses on improving family relationships, not a course focusing on “behavior management” (reward and punishment). Adlerian-based courses, and some others, help parents “work WITH” their children, rather than “do TO” them.
Research is showing that children who are raised respectfully (without reward and punishment) tend to have many fewer mental and physical illnesses in later life and to live longer. See “Improving parenting: the why and the how,” downloadable for $20 at http://adc.bmj.com/content/93/2/102.full (it’s well worth it!). The author is Dr. Sarah Stewart-Brown, a physician, researcher, and director of a university school of public health in the UK. Improving parenting is part of her country’s “respect agenda.”
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in collaboration with Kaiser Permanente’s Health Appraisal Clinic in San Diego, has found that childhood traumas “are major risk factors for the leading causes of illness and death in later life as well as poor quality of life in the United States. Progress in preventing and recovering from the nation’s worst health and social problems is likely to benefit from the understanding that many of these problems arise as a consequence of adverse childhood experiences.” (From the ACE Study, “one of the largest investigations ever conducted on the links between childhood maltreatment and later-life health and well-being.” (cdc.gov/needphp/ACE/)
What Is the Puget Sound Adlerian Society (PSAS)?
The Puget Sound Adlerian Society is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit educational organization. We offer Positive Discipline and Disciplina Positiva (free, donation- and grant-funded parenting courses) and free monthly First Friday Forums for counselors, therapists, and anyone else who is interested in human relationships and well-being. We also co-sponsor trainings for parent educators and for teachers. We welcome membership inquiries and visitors to our free library. See Parenting with PSAS (p. 5) for more information about Adlerian parenting. For our calendar of PSAS events, please see psasadler.org/education.pdf.