Programs for Parents & Carers

Our parenting programs support anyone who wants to strengthen their parenting skills and confidence and are typically delivered in small group settings.

You gain access to the latest research and evidence-based parenting strategies/skills.
You can discover how to match your parenting/caring style to your child’s unique personality and needs.
You will gain confidence in your parenting/caring skills which is crucial to good care provision.
Group work is also a great way to connect with other parents and carers and build a support network with other people who get it.
Delivery of parenting programs is funded by NSW DCJ Community and Family Support Program. Most programs are free unless stated otherwise.

If you are interested in registering for one of our groups, please contact us on 4914 0444, email info@mfss.com.au, or complete our Contact Form on the website.

We support families through a range of evidence-based parenting programs including:

Family violence

Men

Mental & emotional health

Separation & Divorce

Women

1-2-3 Magic® & Emotion Coaching program

The 1-2-3 Magic® & Emotion Coaching program supports parents and carers to develop strategies to promote positive behaviour in their children aged 2-12 years. The program focuses on parents and carers strengthening their relationship with their child and providing consistent responses that work with a child’s developing brain.

Bringing Up Great Kids First 1000 days

Bringing Up Great Kids Foundational Program

Bringing Up Great Kids Foundational Program focuses on building positive and nurturing relationships between parents and their children. The program aims to support parents to review and enhance their patterns of communication with their children, to promote more respectful interactions, and encourage the development of their children’s positive self-identity. Bringing Up Great Kids First 1000 days builds on the foundational program by focusing on the first 1000 days of a child’s life and the influence parents and carers have on their child’s development. The workshop emphasises the creation and support of safe and nurturing environments by understanding brain development in the earliest stages of life and the impact of family relationships during this time. Parents will reflect on their own childhood and explore how to connect with their children so they have increased confidence and help-seeking behaviour.

Caring Dads

Caring Dads is a 17-week evidence-based and behaviour change group intervention program. It supports the premise that violence against women and children are strongly linked and supports fathers to understand the impact of their behaviour by harnessing their motivation to be good fathers.

Circle of Security® Parenting™ program

Imagine what it might feel like if you were able to make sense of what your child was really asking from you. The Circle of Security® Parenting™ program is based on decades of research about how secure parent-child relationships can be supported and strengthened.

Dads Tuning in to Kids

Dads Tuning in to Kids is a parenting program that aims to give fathers helpful ways of teaching their child the skills of emotional intelligence. This program teaches emotion coaching which is to recognise, understand, and respond to children’s emotions in an accepting, supportive way. These are the same skills that are taught in Tuning in to Kids®, however the Dad’s program provides additional content particularly relevant to fathers. This approach nurtures a positive parent-child relationship and helps parents support children to understand and manage their emotions.

Indigenous Triple P

For Indigenous parents and caregivers or parents and caregivers of Indigenous children, interested in promoting their child’s development and potential, or have concerns about their child’s mild to moderate level of behavioural problems, or simply wish to prevent behaviour problems from developing.

Keeping Kids in Mind

Keeping Kids in Mind is a program for separated parents who want to develop understanding and learn strategies to support their children following parental separation. The program recognises that parents love their children and want the best for them but that parenting can also be much tougher after separation. The program supports parents to see the separation through their children’s eyes.

No Scaredy Cats™

No Scaredy Cats™ is a child development program for children aged 2-12 years that supports parents and carers to recognise if anxiety is developing in their child, how to take a preventative role in the development of anxiety problems, and practical steps to encourage resilient thinking skills. Parents and carers will learn how to support their child through their experience of anxiety problems and emotionally distressing times using a ‘parent-led’ approach; taking on the role of coach in their child’s life.

Reclaiming My Place

RMP creates a space for the participants to have positive life-long learning and educational experiences. The program works with genderbased violence as a wide-spread social problem as well as a traumatic personal experience. Working with perceptions of self-value and capability, the space created provides a platform for conversation about the role education can play in participants’ lives. The program aims to generate relationships of learning and support between the participants themselves, the practitioners who participate, the art, the facilitator and the space created by the program.

Start Today Again

Start Today Again is a training program that assists individual men and men’s groups to understand the impact of family violence on children, and suggests ways in which changes in parenting relationships can be made. It is based on the belief that men can become part of the solution, both as bystanders understanding the impacts of family violence on children, and as men who decide that it is better to exchange attempts to control their family through any form of violence for attempts to build better and more supportive relationships with their children and partners.

The Black Box Parenting Program

The Black Box Parenting Program is designed specifically for the challenges of parenting after violence. It offers parents and carers the opportunity to safely think about how they interact with their children and manage challenges after violence. Parents and carers learn about the impact of trauma on the developing brain, how the attachment disruption affects behaviour and the parenting bond, and how to repair this bond.

The Seasons for Growth Parent Program

The Seasons for Growth Parent Program provides an opportunity for parents to better understand the experience of death, separation, and divorce from a child’s perspective. The program draws on evidence about what children experience and need, to help them transition positively through family change. The program has two separate components, supporting your child following separation or divorce, and supporting your child following the death of someone they love. The distinctive child-centred approach provides emotional space and a non-judgemental environment for parents to share, discuss, and learn ideas and strategies to support their children.

The Shark Cage

The Shark Cage® Program for Adult Women is an evidence-based program for groups or individual women that explores the common types of abuse that women experience, and how this abuse relates to violations in human rights. It is relevant for women who have experienced more than one instance of abuse in their lives and may have begun to internalise social messages of victim-blaming against girls and women. Women learn how to recognise their feelings, develop skills in assertive communication, and heal from the impacts and trauma of their experiences.

Tuning in to Kids

Tuning in to Kids® is an evidence-based, emotion-focused parenting program. Parents and carers will learn the skills of emotion coaching—a way of responding to emotions that can help children understand, regulate, and work with them, so they can manage their behaviour and respond in a socially appropriate way. In particular, the program teaches parents to notice children’s emotions, before they have become overwhelming for the child. Parents and carers learn how to support their children to reflect upon, or name, the emotions being experienced and, if necessary, work through them.

Delivery is based on organisational capacity and may require a service fee.