The Chicago Parent Program: Comparing 1‐year outcomes for African American and Latino parents of young children

Child behavior problems can be pervasive and costly, with long-term implications for children’s learning and peer relationships (Campbell, 2002; National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, 2008). It is estimated that the cumulative cost of child behavior problems through adolescence can exceed $60,000 per child secondary to health care costs, grade retention, and juvenile justice involvement (Foster & Jones, 2005). For these reasons, behavior problems in children are a high level mental and public health priority (Denham et al., 2000; Foster & Kalil, 2005; National Research Council and Institute of Medicine [IOM], 2009). Fortunately, researchers have found that child behavior problems are preventable and treatable. Behavioral parent training is now considered a gold standard for the treatment and prevention of behavioral problems in young children (Barlow, Smailagic, Ferriter, Bennett, & Jones, 2010; Gross, Garvey, Julion, & Fogg, 2007; Pearl, 2009). However, few parenting skills training programs have been designed for families of color or from low-income communities. The Chicago Parent Program (CPP) was created in 2002 to fill this gap (Gross, Garvey, et al., 2007). The purpose of this study was to assess the 1- year outcomes of the CPP on parenting skills and young children’s behavior problems and compare its effects for African-American and Latino families from low-income communities. A number of parenting programs have been shown to improve parenting and child behavior. These include the Parent Management Training-Oregon Model (PMTO; Hagen, Ogden, & Bjornebekk, 2011; Ogden & Hagen, 2008); The Incredible Years (Webster Stratton, Reid, & Hammond, 2004); Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT; Eyberg, Boggs, & Algina, 1995), and the Triple-P Positive Parenting Program (Sanders, Markie-Dadds, Tully, & Bor, 2000). All of these programs are guided by social learning theory and the coercive process model (Bandura, 1997; Patterson, 1982; Wyatt Kaminski, Valle, Filene, & Boyle, 2008). Central to this model is the assumption that parents and children inadvertently reinforce dysfunctional patterns of interaction through a cycle of coercive interchanges and inconsistent discipline. As children’s misbehaviors escalate, parents become more punitive, coercive, and inconsistent, leading to more child misbehavior and diminished parenting self-efficacy. The core objective of the parent training in these programs is to alter these dysfunctional parent-child interactions by helping parents (a) become more aware of these “reinforcement traps,” (b) learn and apply more consistent, positive, and less coercive discipline strategies, and (c) develop confidence in their parenting skills. There are, however, two important limitations in the application of these parent skills training programs to high-risk families. First, most were originally developed for non-Latino White middle class families. Although some have been adapted for ethnic minority families (Forehand & Kotchick, 1996; Lundahl, Risser, & Lovejoy, 2006; Martinez, & Eddy, 2005), parents still may experience difficulty using culturally adapted programs that retain the basic assumptions of the dominant culture but simply add on “some ethnic features” (Falicov, 2009, p. 295). Second, few of these programs were specifically designed for parents living in low-income communities. This is an important issue because living in low-income neighborhoods presents obstacles for parents that can increase a child’s risk for behavior problems (Gorman-Smith, 2003; Sameroff, Seifer, & McDonough, 2004; Youngstrom, Weist, & Albus, 2003). Parenting styles and practices and the values that guide them vary widely across and within cultural and socioeconomic groups. For example, African American and Latino parents tend to value respect and obedience to a greater extent than non-Latino White parents (Lansford et al., 2011). Moreover, the strategies parents use to teach these values to their children (i.e., the use of autocratic versus authoritarian versus permissive parenting styles) also differ across racial and ethnic groups (Roche, Ensminger, & Cherlin, 2007; Weis & Tooli, 2010) as well as within ethnic groups (Harwood, Schoelmerich, Schulze & Gonzalez, 1999). Socioeconomic differences among families also are known to affect childrearing values and parenting styles (Arditti, Burton, & Neeves-Botelho, 2010; Gonzales et al., 2011). For example, parents raising young children in safe, resource-rich environments may have fewer rules and be more likely to flex those rules than parents raising children in low-income urban neighborhoods (Gross, 1996) where rules are intended to keep children safe. Thus, an important question is whether one parenting program can effectively bridge these cultural and community-level differences known to affect parenting values and behavior and ultimately children’s outcomes. To that end, the Chicago Parent Program (CPP) was developed in collaboration with an advisory board of parents to address the parenting concerns of both African American and Latino low-income families (See Gross, Garvey, et al., 2007 for more information on the development of the CPP). In a previously published randomized trial, the CPP was shown to be effective for improving parent and child outcomes in low-income ethnic minority families (Gross et al., 2009). However, that study was affected by two key limitations: (a) low parent attendance rates that diminished the strength of the intervention and (b) a sample size that was too small to test differences in intervention effects between African American and Latino parents. These are important limitations that can affect interpretation of study results and translation to low-income multi-cultural, multi-racial communities in need of strong evidence-based parenting programs for their families. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to reexamine the efficacy of the CPP using a larger sample of African American and Latino parents and young children and to determine whether there are differences in program effects by parent race/ethnicity.