Parenting

Science and Practice

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The Future of Parenting Programs: An Introduction

Marc H. Bornstein, Jennifer A. Kotler & Jennifer E. Lansford

To cite this article: Marc H. Bornstein, Jennifer A. Kotler & Jennifer E. Lansford (2022)
The Future of Parenting Programs: An Introduction, Parenting, 22:3, 189-200, DOI:
10.1080/15295192.2022.2086808

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PARENTING
2022, VOL. 22, NO. 3, 189–200
https://doi.org/10.1080/15295192.2022.2086808

The Future of Parenting Programs: An Introduction

Marc H. Bornstein , Jennifer A. Kotler , and Jennifer E. Lansford

SYNOPSIS
Human children do not and cannot survive and grow in
a solitary way to achieve responsible adult maturity. They
require caregiving and support from parents. Reciprocally,
good parenting calls for attentive, nurturant, and constructive
action with children. Therefore, scholars and practitioners who
work with families are invested in optimizing child development
through parenting, and programs designed to promote parent­
ing abound around the world. However, the development,
application, and integration of parenting programs to date are
too often siloed and haphazard. In consequence, successes of
parenting programs have been hampered, and the time, efforts,
energy, and funds supporting them have too often been spent
achieving only limited effects, not always at scale. The purpose
of this Parenting: Science and Practice Special Issue is to guide
the design, implementation, uptake, and scaling of future par­
enting programs toward greater rigor, wider acceptance, and
ensured accomplishment.

INTRODUCTION
Parenting is fundamental to the survival and success of the human species.
Everyone who has ever lived has had parents, and the vast majority of adults in
the world become parents. Parenting is a vital status in the life course with
consequences for parents themselves, but equally significantly parenting is
a job whose primary object of attention and action is the child. Evolution and
culture have conspired to entrust parents to procreate and to continue the
species as well as protect, nourish, regulate, educate, and socialize their off­
spring. Parenting therefore encompasses the who, what, where, when, and why
of childrearing. In achieving optimal outcomes for their progeny parenting
often requires resources and supports. Parenting programs around the world
are dedicated to those goals.
How important is parenting? Each generation of adults in every country
on earth determines and manages that country’s politics and economy, social
welfare and education, peace and well-being. Who prepared each generation
of adults to bear and execute these daunting responsibilities? Parenting.
Being present for the entirety of their children’s life course and, more,
being largely accountable for its direction and achievements, parents and
parent figures are charged with the unique and solemn remits to prepare
children for their adult obligations. Parents do not passively bear witness to
© 2022 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
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190 BORNSTEIN ET AL.

children’s development. In large measure, they are answerable for the nature
of their children’s maturity. From the earliest years, parents exert significant
and long-lasting influences over almost every facet of their children’s devel­
opment. Moreover, parental responsibilities, once begun, never end. Parents
are available in the greatest numbers to lobby and labor for children and are
unquestionably the world’s most influential agents over generational pre­
paration and accomplishment, stability and change. Parenthood can be
wonderful and rewarding in these ways but can also be challenging and
fearsome.
Parents and other parental caregiving figures anchor children’s lives.
There appears to be no universal “right way” to parent, and contexts of
many sorts matter to the expression and consequences of parenting.
Moreover, children do not come with an operating manual, and trusting
that parenting best relies on instinct over evidence-based science is short-
sighted, risky, and perhaps downright dangerous because it can lead to
harmful practices (such as abuse or neglect) that can in turn result in lasting
and not easily reversed damage. Swept up in today’s demanding world and
jammed in the era of competing priorities, parents’ attention and responsi­
bilities toward their children are easily compromised. Despite these chal­
lenges, parents possess a keen desire to improve the lives and well-being of
their children, and happily a remarkable bank of credible scientific informa­
tion is accruing about parenting and its effects on children to guide them.
Importantly, parents who command more knowledge about the importance
of parenting and child development are more likely to engage in nurturant,
informed, and positive parenting practices, whereas those with limited
knowledge are at greater risk of acting out negative parenting practices
with deleterious consequences.
With the centrality of parenting in mind, it is hardly surprising that
thoughts and efforts toward optimizing parenting have occupied philosophers,
politicians, and preachers as well as medical, social, and behavioral scientists
for generations. In the past, those thoughts and efforts were largely directed at
individual parents and other caregiving figures who supervise children in
individual families. In contemporary times, concerted larger-scale efforts
have been undertaken to prepare parents-to-be and advise parents-who-are
for the multiple constructive responsibilities of caregiving. Government and
non-governmental officials, policymakers, educators, practitioners, and par­
ents alike increasingly turn to social and behavioral science for evidence-based
research on how to promote positive development in children and how society
might best support positive parenting and positive child development. This
knowledge has been instantiated in parenting prevention, support, and inter­
vention programs. Here we use the generic term program to refer to the three
 PARENTING 191

(prevention, support, and intervention) in a more constructive framework,

and so eschew deficit thinking that is sometimes connoted by use of off-
putting terminology.
This Special Issue houses three articles centrally concerned with three main
stages of developing effective parenting programs and ensuring their adoption
and success: one on design, one on implementation, and one on uptake and
scaling. This introduction covers preliminary and overarching issues concern­
ing this Special Issue: the rationale for this Special Issue, how parenting and
child caregiving are defined, the scope of parenting programs, précises of the
three substantive articles in the Special Issue, interdigitation of the three
articles, their intended audiences, and key messages.

RATIONALE
For more than a century, in many countries around the world, policy
makers, funders, and researchers have defined who parents are, what good
parenting looks like, and who should receive parenting programs. However,
early efforts to sustain families and parenting through direct provision of
healthcare, nutrition, housing, and prevention of child maltreatment were
often guided by a deficit framework with the idea that, if society provided
specific services and supports, whatever the “problem” was, it would be
fixed, and family functioning would follow a more optimal path. However,
this way of thinking and working with parents and children neglected vast
systemic inequities related to ethnicity, class, gender, caste, sexual orienta­
tion, ability, status, and geography that play formative defining roles in the
capacities of parents to nurture and provide for children. Since their intro­
duction in the early 2000s, “human-centered design” and data-driven con­
tinuous quality improvement methods have put parents and other potential
program participants at the center of planning for how best to provide
parent- and child-centered services. Moreover, implementation researchers
have played a collaborative role in revisiting health, social, and educational
services with the aim of establishing nurturant and positive caregiving at the
center of program development. By employing a strengths-based approach
that builds on what parents want and already can provide for their children,
parent involvement in programs has become a positive (rather than
a punitive or shameful) experience, and increasingly parents are viewed as
active program partners, rather than passive recipients of program
information.
If parents can be placed into positive development-promoting circum­
stances, then the course of their parenting can be changed in constructive
ways and consequently the lives of their children can be enhanced and pre­
sumably the next generation advanced. This holistic, aspirational, and san­
guine vision for the application of parenting programs capitalizes on the
192 BORNSTEIN ET AL.

demonstrated developmental plasticity of parent and child alike. Both parents

and children harbor instincts to ensure the survival of offspring, but parenting
is constituted in telling respects of learned and acquired cognitions and
practices, shaped by knowledge, attitudes, emotions, and cultural customs.
As such, familial and contextual influences play important parts in the devel­
opment and expression of parenting. Parenting programs around the world
have been designed to provide the learning opportunities that parents need to
confidently fulfill the multivocal tasks of parenting. Parenting programs may
contribute to efforts that provide diverse parents with equitable and just
opportunities to maximize their aspirations and actions aimed at being active
producers of positive development in their children.
Parenting programs have two propitious, equally important, and integrally
interrelated generic goals: One goal is to improve the lives and well-being as
well as knowledge, resources, and caregiving of parents directly, and
the second goal (achieved indirectly through the first goal) is to improve the
lives, well-being, and development of children. Both are optimistic and noble
aspirations. Innumerable investigators as well as governmental and non-
governmental policy makers around the globe have undertaken the important
work of planning, developing, implementing, and evaluating parenting pro­
grams with these twin goals in mind. Unfortunately, as is widely known and
accepted, the time, effort, funds, and good will that are all requisite to
a parenting program too often result in marginal effects or sometimes outright
failures. They do so for a large variety of reasons. Opinions about parenting
abound, frequently conditioned by socio-political currents, and global cultural
variation impedes the widespread ready application of lessons learned in one
program to another.
Designing, implementing, evaluating, and scaling parenting programs entail
gathering and coalescing knowledge and best practices from multiple sophis­
ticated but often siloed disciplines and sources. Not every program designer,
implementer, or scaler has access to this knowledge or those best practices.
Happily, evidence-based scientific information about parenting as well as
optimization in the design, implementation, uptake, and scaling of parenting
programs is steadily accruing. This Parenting: Science and Practice Special
Issue on the Future of Parenting Programs provides succinct integrated treat­
ments on four fundamental issues directly pertinent to parenting programs.
The proximate aim of this Special Issue is to alert and inform investigators and
policy makers alike to that knowledge and those best practices of parenting
program design, implementation, uptake, and scaling, that is to lessons
learned from past and present successes and failures. The ultimate aim is to
guide future producers and consumers of parenting programs by succinctly
reviewing and deconstructing in useful and informative ways what has been
gleaned from designing and implementing parenting programs as well as
ensuring their uptake and scaling.
 PARENTING 193

WHO PARENTS ARE AND WHAT PARENTING IS

Given the acknowledged fundamental role that parents (and other child
caregivers) play in the lives of children, and the influences that they
command over the well-being of children from infancy to maturity,
parenting is acknowledged biologically and psychologically to stand
among the most important determinants of human development and
shapers of generations. In this forum, parenting is defined as “all of
children’s principal caregivers and their many modes of caregiving.” The
cast of characters who parent children is long and naturally includes
biological and adoptive mothers, fathers, single parents, and divorced
and remarried parents, but when siblings, grandparents, nonfamilial
caregivers, and mentors adopt responsibility for children they also par­
ent. Parenting programs are directed to all these dramatis personae.

THE SCOPE OF PARENTING PROGRAMS

This Special Issue focuses on traditional parenting programs, those most often
delivered in person and in a group specifically and intentionally to enhance
parenting, although examples are also provided of less traditional parenting
programs, such as those that have included online delivery during the COVID-
19 pandemic. Parenting programs are practiced widely, and take many forms,
and their messages and information are presented in numerous ways. When
parents specifically seek support and information about parenting, they need
to be assured that they are provided with evidenced-based content that is
relevant and targeted to their specific needs.
Parenting programs are normally designed with agenda pertinent to
the requisites of a target population. Prominent examples are programs
specifically planned to inform and change parenting; programs that
impact parenting and provide enabling support without having that
aim explicit in their theory of change (e.g., income support programs,
parent livelihood/job-oriented programs; two-generation programs); pro­
grams that focus on supporting maternal nutrition during pregnancy or
provide resources for lactating mothers; and programs to prevent ado­
lescent pregnancy. The three articles in this Parenting Special Issue speak
generically to issues in the design, implementation, uptake, and scaling
of parenting programs independent of any specific substantive goal of
any specific program. However, examples are drawn from programs that
directly guide parents to acquire or develop new skills or provide knowl­
edge about child development rather than from cash transfers and sub­
sidy programs that might indirectly affect parenting.
194 BORNSTEIN ET AL.

I Design

What should the next generation of parenting program designers appreciate to

take advantage of knowledge gained from past and extant parenting pro­
grams? What are best practices in parenting program design? The first of the
three companion articles on the future of parenting programs focuses on
program design. Article I addresses several issues: key pre-design questions,
design contents, design components, design targeting and sampling, measure­
ment in design, and controls and comparisons in evaluating design
effectiveness.
Designers of parenting programs need to keep these key issues in mind
from the start. Although specific program designs likely differ, many still share
a plethora of overarching meta-principles. Evidence-based research and scien­
tific rigor lie at the core of all quality program designs. Design challenges span
a wide range of decisions in how to devise, implement, and evaluate preven­
tions, supports, and interventions with parents. Importantly, upstream deci­
sions commit to downstream outcomes. Parenting programs ideally call for
the inclusion of efficacy as well as effectiveness trials. Additional significant
design considerations include costs and challenges for organizations deliver­
ing the parenting program and families using it along with cultural considera­
tions that appropriately adapt programs to targeted families; they also
encompass assessments of design infrastructure to support building on exist­
ing knowledge. Finally, programs are typically multi-dimensional and
dynamic but are always designed for specific participants, with specific goals,
and apt to specific contexts. In consequence, these several specificities chal­
lenge the idea of the widespread or ready application of any one program
protocol; normally, thoughtful adaptations to new populations and circum­
stances are required.

II Implementation
Implementation science refers to the use of systematic data collection and
research methods to enhance the dissemination and sustainment of evi­
dence-based practices into routine operations. Article II examines the roles
that implementation science plays in parenting programs. Implementation
science enables researchers to move beyond monitoring and evaluation of
outcomes of parenting programs to understand the process of implementa­
tion. Pre-implementation considerations are key to success, and robust
situation analysis, explicit attention to cultural sensitivities, existing infra­
structure and entry platforms, budgets, and community ownership/cham­
pions are all important issues with respect to implementation. Factors such
as whether the program meets the needs of families and communities, how
to secure buy-in from key stakeholders, what training and supervision are
 PARENTING 195

needed for the implementation workforce, and ways that parenting pro­
grams can be integrated in existing infrastructure are all critical to success­
ful implementation. Quality improvement can be built into the
implementation process through feedback loops that inform rapid changes
and testing cycles over time as a program is implemented. If researchers
lead initial program implementation, they must determine how the pro­
gram can continue successfully in the hands of community workers and
other professionals. Open access components are especially important for
implementing parenting programs in low- and middle-income countries to
avoid prohibitive costs of proprietary programs and to benefit from flex­
ibility in adapting components to meet the needs of particular local popu­
lations. Parenting programs profit when policy makers, program leaders,
and researchers alike attend to the what as well as the how of implementa­
tion. Regular communications on evidence and the science can be mar­
shaled to help build ownership and translate evidence in practical and
useful ways.
Attending to implementation improves parenting programs by helping
researchers and practitioners understand the specificities of what works for
whom and under what circumstances. If a parenting program developed in
one place is used in another place without careful attention to factors that
might hinder implementation, the originally effective program may lose effi­
cacy in the new location. Recruiting, training, and supervising the workforce
that delivers the program are critical to successful implementation. Adapting
programs by evaluating and changing specific features of their implementa­
tion, if those features are not working well, is essential to ongoing quality
improvement efforts. Open access components, reasonable costs, analysis of
infrastructure, and technical supports are all also crucial to successful imple­
mentation efforts. The investment of community participation and ownership
of parenting programs enhances implementation by ensuring that the pro­
gram addresses local needs.

III Uptake and Scaling

Scaling up interventions is defined as expanding or replicating pilot or small-
scale projects to reach populations and/or broaden program effectiveness.
After the successes of a program design and implementation have been
demonstrated in an efficacy trial, several points with respect to uptake and
scaling become prominent. One is costing: Contemporary standards treat
cost-effectiveness analysis of programs as a requisite component of scaling.
The second is effectiveness: An effectiveness study tests whether a previously
efficacy-tested program still works when scaled-up in the naturalistic condi­
tions of the real world and outside of the researchers’ control. The third is
sustainability: Scaling up almost always requires alterations to the original
196 BORNSTEIN ET AL.

program design. It is good practice, therefore, early in the design and imple­
mentation process to consider how the program will be integrated into exist­
ing platforms that may already reach large numbers of potential participants.
The fourth is messaging: Parenting program take-away messages ideally meet
the needs and goals of specific participants in specific contexts in participant-
preferred ways to ensure uptake. One size does not fit all parents, circum­
stances, or goals, and effective programs must assess the different needs of
different parents, circumstances, and goals. Three pivotal points determine
uptake where understanding different needs of parents is critical: entry,
engagement, and follow-up. Appreciating both intrinsic and extrinsic factors
in parents’ lives influences uptake, and effectively scaling up programs to new
populations or in different contexts requires accommodating to the specific
needs of participants and contexts.
Where Articles I and II concentrate on the supply side of parenting pro­
grams (i.e., their design and implementation logistics), Article III focuses on
the demand side of parenting programs (i.e., what parents want, what they
need, whether the two are congruent, and how the two reconcile with the
extant evidence base) as well as various factors that influence how parents
engage in programs, adhere to programmatic messages, and support scaling
such programs. Article III therefore focuses on how extrinsic (culture and
society) and intrinsic (individual circumstances and characteristics) aspects of
program participants’ lives ensure the success of parenting programs.
A framework is proposed which highlights the dynamic nature between
demand and supply factors. In this framework, factors such as policy and
contextual affordances (including cultural norms and attitudes, family friendly
policies, and family and community resources and barriers) as well as personal
characteristics (including gender and age, education and competencies, dis­
position and motivation, and perceptions of children’s needs) influence the
degree to which parents enter a program, persist with a program, and continue
with the program’s influences after the program has formally concluded.
Understanding how parents engage in programs and ensuring that they do
so successfully are critical for successful scaling. These goals are typically met
by checking in with parents themselves (as through interviews, consultations,
questionnaires, and surveys). Programs that work to include parents and other
child caregivers in the workforce, governance, and social and political mobi­
lization are likely to show greater uptake than those that do not.

Special Issue Organization

Although each article in this Parenting: Science and Practice Special Issue
focuses on a specific feature of parenting programs, the topics with which
each article is concerned interconnect and inevitably overlap. Designers of
a parenting program need to take into consideration who will implement the
 PARENTING 197

program and how, how best to ensure that the program will meet the needs of
the intended parent consumers, and whether policy makers will find value in
and adopt the program. Complementarily, the workforce that actually imple­
ments a parenting program constitutes the front-line workers who engage
parents to take up the program’s messages, fundamentals, and overarching
goals; that workforce needs to be fully cognizant and well-trained in program
design. Reciprocally, the consumers of a parenting program, whether parents
and other child caregivers or policy makers, need to understand how a program
is designed, implemented, and fits with existing societal structures. Each of
these several facets of a parenting program – design, implementation, and
uptake and scaling – has multiple nuanced and sophisticated constituents,
that to be fully appreciated must be described and analyzed for themselves. In
this Special Issue, the three substantive articles address each facet separately for
heuristic purposes only, but the several facets of parenting programs proceed
hand-in-glove with one another. Thus, each article in this Special Issue treats
a different perspective on parenting programs and is self-contained, yet the
Special Issue as a whole endeavors to enhance and interrelate the main themes
by bringing shared perspectives to bear on the central variety of concerns in
parenting program theory, research, practice, and application.

INTENDED AUDIENCE
Although the three substantive articles in this Parenting: Science and Practice
Special Issue are geared specifically to parenting programs, parenting programs
are an instance of a larger class of preventions, supports, and interventions. As
a consequence of its structure and scope, this Special Issue will certainly appeal
to professionals concerned with parenting but also to a wider variety of
program designers, implementers, and scalers on the world stage. Succinctly,
many of the principles of parenting program design, implementation, uptake,
and scaling detailed here likely apply equally to many other kinds of programs.

SUMMARY AND KEY MESSAGES

Today’s children constitute tomorrow’s adults who will shape the world, but
children today do not and cannot grow up without the caring support of adults.
Children require and depend on parental caregivers. The goal of parenting is to
help rear children to be socially contributing adults. Parenting programs are
developed to support parents and parent figures in this charge. Therefore,
scholars and practitioners of many stripes have been invested in optimizing
child development through parenting, and parenting programs designed to do
so abound around the world. Unfortunately, most parenting programs exist in
isolation from each other and do not systematically apply informed best-
practices approaches to program design, implementation, uptake, and scaling.
198 BORNSTEIN ET AL.

It is not surprising that the effectiveness of many programs is short-lived if

beneficial at all. This Parenting: Science and Practice Special Issue has been
developed to guide the design, implementation, uptake, and scaling of future
parenting programs toward greater rigor, acceptance, and success.

Parenting Program Design

● Parenting programs need to be fully informed by thoughtful considerations
of critical design features, including the theory of change underlying the
program, program contents, components, targeting and sampling, mea­
surement, and experimental standards for evaluating effectiveness.
● Parenting program successes, and thereby optimal caregiving, child devel­
opment, and family life, can be improved, if not ensured, through the
execution of best practices in program design.
● Building and disseminating knowledge about good program design is
vital to future parenting programs that enhance caregiving, children,
and families.
● Design challenges span a wide range of decisions about how to devise,
implement, and evaluate parenting programs. Evidence-based research
and scientific rigor lie at the core of quality parenting program designs.
● Upstream design decisions commit to downstream program outcomes.
● Specific parenting program designs likely differ but still share many
common overarching meta-principles.
● Parenting programs are multi-dimensional and dynamic but always occur
with specific aims involve specific participants and take place in specific
contexts.

Parenting Program Implementation

● The implementation process should be informed by needs assess­
ments to determine whether a given program addresses the pro­
blems or goals parents have for their community, region, or country.
● Implementation proceeds through grappling with how to encourage buy-
in at multiple levels from the family to the agency or organization to the
community and larger policy and funding contexts.
● One way to facilitate implementation is to adapt and develop par­
enting programs to leverage existing systems with effective infra­
structure for delivering services and resources to families and
children.
● Continuous assessments of implementation with stakeholders make it
possible to course correct to improve the quality of parenting programs
over time.
 PARENTING 199

● Policy makers, program leaders, and researchers need to collaborate

frequently to understand the what as well as the how of implementation.

Parenting Program Uptake and Scaling

● The demand side of programming is as important as the supply side to
achieve scale because of the importance of understanding beneficiary
priorities or end user preferences.
● Both intrinsic and extrinsic factors in parents’ lives influence uptake.
● Demand side factors are divisible into two areas: policy and contextual
affordances and personal characteristics, skills, and motivations.
● Scaling-up effective programs to new populations or in different contexts
requires understanding the dynamic interplay within and across partici­
pating parents, program design, and implementation.
● Sustainability of program benefits from increased uptake and demand,
whereby parents maintain programs through their engagement.
● Systems coherence, workforce, governance, and social and political mobi­
lization are all strong influencers in scaling and current and/or graduated
participants can play critical roles in ensuring successful outcomes.

AFFILIATIONS AND ADDRESSES

Marc H. Bornstein, Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human
Development, 8404 Irvington Avenue, Bethesda MD 20817-3838, U.S.A. Email: marc.h.born­
stein@gmail.com. Erinna C. Dia is at UNICEF, Jennifer A. Kotler is with Google, Inc., Jennifer E.
Lansford is at Duke University, and Chemba Raghavan and Radhika Mitter are at UNICEF.

ARTICLE INFORMATION

Conflict of Interest Disclosures

Each author signed a form for disclosure of potential conflicts of interest. No authors reported
any financial or other conflicts of interest in relation to the work described.

Ethical Principles
The authors affirm having followed professional ethical guidelines in preparing this work. This
ms. did not have any patient involvement or require ethics approval.

Funding
MHB was supported by the Intramural Research Program of the NIH/NICHD, UNICEF, and
an International Research Fellowship at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, funded by the European
Research Council under the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.
200 BORNSTEIN ET AL.

Role of the Funders/Sponsors

None of the funders or sponsors of this article had any role in its design and conduct,
preparation, review, or approval of the manuscript, or decision to submit the manuscript for
publication.

Acknowledgements
We thank UNICEF and the LEGO Foundation for generous support of the preparation of this
Special Issue on The Future of Parenting Programs. The ideas and opinions expressed herein
are those of the authors alone, and endorsement by the authors’ institutions or funding
agencies is not intended and should not be inferred.

ORCID
Marc H. Bornstein http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6810-8427
Jennifer A. Kotler http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9085-5528
Jennifer E. Lansford http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1956-4917