Before we developed this guide, we questioned the need because we had some awareness of the massive amount of parenting information that is available online and assumed that most parents would use the Internet and other options to enhance their parenting skills. But after visiting with some younger parents, we found that even though they had many options, they found that because of the massive amount of information available online, parents can spend hours searching for blogs, looking at parenting tips, and personal accounts on how to raise their children. While this can be informative, it is also time-consuming and confusing. Plus, each expert seemed to have their own unique approach to unlocking parenting strength. Because of this, these  young parents rarely took the time to do any searching to learn more about parenting and the need to grow the skills they were using at the present time.

Before we shared our ideas about the guide, we wanted them to know about us so we shared the following:

• We are not parenting experts, but we have experienced the daily challenges of parenting our own children. Our children are now adults, and they have children.
• We are teachers and education specialists who have experience working with students at all grade levels. As educators we have worked with many parents and many, many students.
• We have served as members of the Learning Disabilities Association of Iowa (LDA-IA) for many years. This has given us the opportunity to work with parents who have encountered many parenting challenges – both at home and school.

We made sure that these parents understood that the information in the guide would not be our personal ideas about parenting but it would come from:

• Parenting information and data based on proven research findings taken from up-to-date articles.
• Parenting best practices selected from credible parenting organizations and other websites that are research based and have proven to meet the needs of parents to grow their parenting skills from birth into adulthood.
• Videos and other selected articles and materials for parents to use to gain more information if and when needed.
• Skills and videos for all ages that demonstrate best practices.

At the end of our visitation, these young families encouraged us to develop a guide because they definitely believed it was something they would use and was needed. But the one thing they stressed was: they hoped we could find a way to decrease the amount of time needed to access the information that would be in the guide.

Once we started the search, the more we learned. It was obvious if we had known what is now available about effective parenting and had implemented this information, that information would have been helpful in resolving many of the parenting situations that we encountered in our own families as well as families that we had assisted. In fact, the more we searched, the more we found ourselves making the statement “I wish I had known this when I was raising our children!”

SUMMARY:
Parents are busy people and we understood what the parents we interviewed meant when they said “It would be most helpful if we could find a way to decrease the amount of time parents need to take in order to find and learn more about the main skills that parents need.”

During our search, we read many different articles and looked at numerous videos. Most had information that related to what we were looking for, but we had to make some decisions to meet the needs of busy parents. So here is our organizational intent. Starting with Section two and for the rest of Part 1, we have selected information from one or two articles for each topic. If the information selected from an article is long, we have stated the title in addition to listing it in the bibliography.

We have not listed any videos in most of the topics but we do encourage you to google and select at least one or two videos to gain additional information for each topic. When you get to Part Two, you will find many videos have been included for most of the skills and strategies needed for your parent – child parenting that start at birth and continues to age 18. You will find that you will be able to grow many, many parenting skills for each of the ages.