Special Thanks to D&E Counseling for providing this testimonial!
Stacey is a mother of two children; she lives in Youngstown, Ohio.
Recently she participated in the D&E Center’s Incredible Years Parent Training Course, which is a 14-session educational program in the management of children whose behaviors and/or emotional disorders present multiple parenting challenges to their parents.
Stacey raised herself, she told us, relating how she grew up in a home where her mother suffered from drug addiction, alcoholism and schizophrenia. Stacey said, “It was a very bad bringing up. Child welfare took me and my sisters at 7, but then put us back home after a little while. It was terrible; my mom had no idea how to raise us. I learned nothing from her on how to be a good mother.”
Stacey came to D&E because her son had autism and one of her nephews (who lived with her) was having a lot of problems in school. Stacey, through her children’s therapist, was connected with the Center’s Incredible years leaders, Shirley Ferguson and Gary Baughman, and joined 17 other families in the 14 week course.
“Before I took the course,” she said, “I had no concept of how to deal with my children’s behaviors, their tantrums, their fighting, their yelling at me. It was frustrating and a lot of times it was so stressful I would just cry, but all that has changed since I took the Center’s parenting classes.”
Asked how it has changed, Stacey said, “I have learned how to stay focused on what I have to do to properly respond to their behaviors, what to do if they show aggression, don’t get along with each other, get verbally abusive and try and make me feel bad.”
When asked about the other families in the training group that she got to meet, she said, “It was great, we keep in contact with each other, support each other. Knowing other parents have had to deal with the same problems as me makes me not feel along, like before. I used to feel I was a bad person because me and the kids were always fighting. Now I feel I’m just a parent who, like other parents, have to work hard to stick to the right responses when my kids get difficult to manage.”
When asked what she would like to say to sum up her experiences with the program, she said, “I feel now I have the ability to raise my kids in a way that won’t lead them down the path that some of my nephews and cousins have gone down – school suspensions, drugs, trouble with the law. I would recommend this program to any parent with a young child they are having problems with. Everything they taught me works and I am going to stick with it.”