Mobile Internet-Based Application to Promote Positive Parenting

Despite a strong body of evidence supporting the use of behavioral parenting strategies in dealing with child behavioral problems and the existence of empirically supported behavioral parent training protocols to teach parents how to employ these strategies; there is also a large amount of misinformation, opinion, and conflicting ideas concurrently being disseminated.  The Internet has made the process of getting accurate, best-practice information harder rather than less cumbersome because of the great amount and variable quality of parenting information available.  A Google search of “parent/parenting” produces 190,000,000 results, “behavioral parenting” reduces this is 73,500,000, and ‘empirically-validated behavioral parenting” still returns 6,330,000 results (search conducted using Google Chrome 07/16/2014). Parents need a resource to receive trust-worthy information in a digestible format that would assist them in being able to use this information to develop behavioral programs for their children.  As important as accurate information is implementation integrity.  An effective empirically supported behavior plan is faced with numerous barriers to consistent implementation. There are a wide-variety of factors that can interfere with the implementation of even the strongest parenting strategies, and both needing timely reminders and tracking the details (Webster-Stratton, 1998) are frequently noted.  These barriers, however, are also noted as exactly the kinds of factors that technology is often able to address (Hollon, et al., 2002; NIMH, 2003).

Based on this need, we have developed and are actively testing a cross-platform application “ParentNet” which will help parents to utilize best-practices in behavioral parenting to create personalized, specific programs for their children.  The application can coordinate communication among family members to increase consistency and encourage clear expectations to cross settings.  Youth and families are encouraged to share information about tasks, the completion of objectives, and rewards desired/received.  Focus groups, surveys, and usage data are being used to move this initial product to a more approachable and easy-to-access application.  This presentation will demonstrate the capabilities of the “ParentNet” application, we will review data gathered to date, and outline plans for future development work.