Parenting Research Centre | Parenting with a Learning Difficulty in Sweden

Parenting with a Learning Difficulty in Sweden

Can the Australian parent education program Parenting Young Children for parents with intellectual disability be transferred and implemented, to good effect, with parents in Sweden?

The first international application of the Parenting Young Children (PYC) program has begun in Sweden. The project will see the implementation of PYC across nine municipalities in Sweden and will investigate practitioner and organisational-level factors that influence the successful adoption and implementation of the program into the Swedish context.

Agencies and practitioners across Sweden will implement PYC with families across Sweden. The research will be overseen in a collaborative effort between the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, Brock University in Canada and the Parenting Research Centre (PRC).

Parenting Young Children was developed by the PRC to help parents with intellectual disability learn basic parenting skills and develop confidence in their ability to parent their children. The program is based on over 20 years of research and was adapted from evidence-based parenting programs developed in Canada and the United States. This research project is examining whether this program can be successfully translated and applied to a sample of parents with intellectual disability in Sweden.

PYC has already been translated into Swedish and 30 practitioners have been trained to implement the program with families. Further practitioner training will occur in Sweden in 2012.

The evaluation of the implementation of PYC in Sweden will be conducted in three phases. Phase 1, now complete, saw the use of qualitative methods including focus group interviews, in-depth individual interviews, and social network mapping to assess the social validity of the Swedish version of PYC, from the perspective of professionals and parents using the program. Phase 2 will see the evaluation of the implementation of PYC across Sweden using longitudinal analysis of pre- and post-intervention parent and child outcomes, along with evaluation of the facilitators and barriers to effective implementation at the practitioner and organisational level. Phase 3 will evaluate the sustainability of PYC in Sweden.