The pyramid magnet on the refrigerator at Audrey and Dan Tepperman’s Evanston home is not about food. It’s about parenting.
The top, “use sparingly” section is for discipline. The base calls for parent-child relationships built on play.
Such advice circulates at a fall round of evening parenting workshops sponsored by Project SEED, which stands for Strengthening Early Education and Development. Evanston’s Metropolitan Family Services, partnered with Evanston/Skokie School District 65 and the Childcare Network of Evanston, operates the project.
Fall workshops end in November and December and will restart in January. The free workshops meet for 12 weeks at area child care centers and promise participants free care and dinner for their children.
Such incentives lured Audrey Tepperman, 35, and her husband to the pioneer sessions of the program this summer. She said Metropolitan Family Services’ staff impressed her with their willingness to accommodate both her infant and her 4-year-old son, who has special needs.
“It was almost like an oasis to go to in the middle of the week,” she said.
Project SEED is a three-year, federally funded program that encourages pro-social behavior in 3- to 5-year-old children and positive parenting skills. It follows “The Incredible Years” curriculum, an award-winning set of tools designed by a Seattle-based clinical psychologist.
The program focuses on changing behavior through three approaches: instruction for children, for their teachers and for their parents or grandparents.
One of the major problems young children face is being labeled “troubled” earlier in their lives, said program director Greg O’Donnell. The idea behind SEED is to intervene early and to prevent such classifications.
“We desperately want to know what’s normal for a child,” O’Donnell said. “What’s right, what’s wrong?”
These issues surface in parenting group discussions, provoked by “The Incredible Years” book, video vignettes, role-playing activities and take-home assignments. Topics covered range from praise-and-reward systems to limit-setting and timeouts.
“No one ever teaches you about parenting, so this kind of gave us a blueprint,” Audrey Tepperman said.
She added that the workshops left her and her husband with confidence about their parenting skills.
Dan Tepperman, 40, recalled one “homework” assignment: keeping a log of time he played with his children.
“I know I could be better at it, but (keeping a log) makes me conscious of that,” Tepperman said. “It’s important to be down on the floor with them.”
Four parenting groups, one devoted to Spanish speakers, are running this fall. Some of the first groups, which debuted just after Memorial Day, proved popular enough to continue independently. The Teppermans plan to start a small, unofficial group with two other couples from the summer workshops.
A waiting list for future workshops has already formed.
“Now the challenge is the ability to take on the number of people who want to be involved,” O’Donnell said, noting that having enough staff is the biggest constraint to expansion.
O’Donnell said he would like to double the number of parenting groups and train former participants to lead new groups.
Dan Tepperman said he hopes the parenting principles he learned will help him build trust with his children now so they will grow into cooperative teenagers.
“If anything it’s like an investment,” he said. “You put the effort in while they’re young, and then it’ll mature.”
