KEY POINTS:
Papamoa 12-year-old Maria Rapana remembers what her father was like before he did a parenting course last year.
"If I did something wrong when I was little he would smack me straight away," she says. "He had a sort of tone."
Now, she says, her dad is "a different person".
"When he does things he's a lot more fun with us, and he's probably calmer with the way he speaks to us."
Maria's father, John Rapana, and his wife Noelene, both 35, are among the first New Zealanders to try out an American parenting course called The Incredible Years, which has been adopted by the Ministry of Education as its "intervention of choice for children with conduct disorder or severe antisocial behaviour".
Prime Minister Helen Clark this week reiterated a plan to screen 4-year-old children for antisocial behaviour in the new B4 School health check which starts this year.
The rationale is that by the time 14-year-olds go off the rails, it's too late to reform them. But if you catch them at 4, you can save them.
The key to success at that age is not in directly changing the child. It's in helping the child's parents to form a loving but firm relationship with the child.
Last year Principal Youth Court Judge Andrew Becroft said that when he saw a youth sobbing in the dock in the arms of both parents, he had to restrain himself from telling them not to worry because it's such a rare sight.
"Very few serious youth offenders are from stable two-parent homes," he said. "More usually, we see Mum in tears saying, 'I've done all I can, take him, he's yours."'
The 14-year-old who cried in his parents' arms in the Tokoroa court this week, charged with murder, is an exception. If found guilty he is bound to be punished severely.
But in general, social scientists confirm Judge Becroft's observation, that getting into trouble once or twice in your teenage years is practically normal but that the vast majority of serious youth crimes are committed by a tiny minority of about 5 per cent of young offenders from families of "multiple disadvantage" - poverty; unemployment; drug, alcohol and gambling addictions; partner conflict and often violence; and poor parenting skills.
The Incredible Years aims to break this cycle with two-hour group sessions once a week for 14 weeks, plus supportive phone calls to parents during each week to check on how they're doing.
John Rapana, a sawmill foreman, and Noelene, a Plunket nurse, had been successful parents in previous marriages, but when they got together four years ago they had one big disagreement: he smacked, and she didn't.
They each brought one child from their previous marriages: John's daughter Maria, now 12, and Noelene's daughter Hannah, 4. Now they also have their own son, Jacob, 2. They were "desperate" to resolve their differences over discipline.
Once they started The Incredible Years, they were annoyed that discipline came right at the end of the course. The first lesson was simply on how to play with your children and praise them.
"We looked at each other and thought, 'How dumb!"' says Noelene. "We do heaps of that - we take our kids to the park, we praise them.
"But it completely changed us. It was instant change. It was awareness."
The course taught them to let kids lead the play. Course leader Marjorie Douglas gives the example of a father getting out a meccano set.
"Your child, say 4 or 5, might say, 'I want this one to be the Mummy, and this one to be the Daddy and this one to be the baby,"' she says.
"Most fathers say, 'No, let's build this stuff.' The child says, 'Oh, okay.' At that moment you make a division between you and your child."
John Rapana got the message.
"If you have a farm set and a house, say, and they want to chuck the kitchen table in the barn, you don't say, 'That's not where that goes.'
"You go with it. You say, 'Oh wow, you've got the table in the barn!' You just go with it - and they love it."
Later, parents make lists of behaviours they want to encourage ("eat your veges") and resolve to praise those behaviours ("even if it's only a mouthful").
They learn how to treat bad behaviour as "an opportunity to teach", rather than to punish.
"If a child is aggressive, hits or spits, it's an opportunity for the parent to teach that that's wrong, and it's an opportunity for the child to calm down," says Douglas.
"So time out is to teach children to calm down and to think what they've done wrong. It's not a punishment."
For the Rapanas, the new approach has simply made smacking redundant.
"I'll be honest - I still believe in it," says John. "But I was looking for an alternative because I didn't want my wife and I to break up."
Says Noelene: "Now we know that we can use time out and be confident it works. If they start playing up, we look at ourselves instead. If we play and praise them properly, that instantly changes them."
The Rapanas use the tools everywhere. If the kids play up in the car, they stop and put the kids out on the side of the road for time out. If they play up in the supermarket, they find a quiet corner and make that the time out mat. Time out is anywhere that takes the child out of contact with other people.
It doesn't work for everyone. A mother who was referred to the programme at the Education Ministry's Special Education branch in Hamilton, Michelle Simms, says that what she needed for her 4-year-old son Ryan was help for his speech disorder, dyspraxia, not play and praise.
"They had these American videos from the 70s. They really were from the 70s, you could tell from the brown furniture and the hairstyles and the clothes," she says.
"There were some people who wouldn't be playing with their kids, I guess, but me, I play with my son and I didn't get much out of that first bit."
Ironically, she says, of the dozen or so parents in her course, all the ones who she thought actually did need better parenting tools dropped out of the course.
Sue Treanor and Ingrid Altena of Auckland University's Werry Centre for Child and Adolescent Mental Health, which trains the leaders for Incredible Years, say the course has worked for other parents with autistic or attention deficit disordered children.
"It's a group process where they share the successes they are having, then come back and support each other," says Treanor.
Altena admits that the American videos are "shockingly old".
"But we have just opened a shiny new updated version," she says.
Down in Mt Maunganui, Douglas runs a "Dinosaur School" specifically for children with special needs whose parents have done The Incredible Years.
"They are the most challenging children in our area. Because of their limitations and their conditions, they have all kinds of problems," she says.
"But those children learn. In the Dinosaur School they learn things like how to become 'feeling detectors'. They learn anger management and how to be a team member at school, in my family, with my brothers and sisters. They learn how to recognise when they are 'going mental', as they put it, and how to stop themselves."
And the parents, she says, learn how to see the world from their child's point of view.
Douglas, a Peruvian who came here 30 years ago, says New Zealand is not "child-focused".
"Once we become child-focused, things change," she says. "Once I start to see the world from my child's point of view, if my husband and I are fighting, do I ever stop and think, 'How is it for my child listening to that?'
"If you go to work and your wife goes to work, the time you have with your children is really limited. If you are overwhelmed with work and the pressures of life, you might forget to be child-focused.
"So a parenting programme like this says: 'This is a priority in my life. We can be busy, we can be stressed, but if we put our child's needs as a priority then the limited time that we have with them becomes quality time."
Targeting needy families
The research evidence is clear: effective help for children from dysfunctional families must start early and continue throughout childhood.
Professor David Fergusson, who for 31 years has traced the lives of 1265 children born in Christchurch in 1977, backs the decision to start with a parenting programme like The Incredible Years because the evidence for the success of such programmes is stronger than for any other interventions.
"The research from randomised trials suggests programmes like this reduce the rate of problem behaviour by about 40 per cent," he says.
Fergusson, who sits on the expert group for the Government's strategy on antisocial behaviour, says parenting programmes are just one of four interventions which all need to be pursued. The others are:
* Home-visiting programmes such as Family Start or Hippy (Home Interaction Programme for Parents and Youngsters), which combine group-based training with one-on-one visits by trained workers to help parents prepare their children for school.
* Programmes based in early childhood centres, such as the American Head Start scheme which teaches children and their parents about education, healthcare, nutrition and life skills. Long-term evaluations have shown that such programmes, started early, can reduce crime rates 10 to 15 years later.
* School-based programmes which pick up children with problem behaviours and bring in training for both parents and teachers.
Fergusson was part of a group which used his research to start a programme called Early Start in Christchurch in 1995, using Plunket nurses to identify families that needed help within weeks of a child's birth.
Family support workers visit the families - most of them solo mothers - and try to help with whatever the family needs.
The two biggest needs for the 250 families in the programme have turned out to be basic child-rearing skills and budgeting.
Ideally, Fergusson says, such programmes need to screen the whole population to find the neediest families.
Lesley Max, who runs 21 Hippy programmes through her Great Potentials Foundation, says her workers go out and knock on doors to find suitable 4-year-olds.
"Our co-ordinators go out into the local streets in search of people, particularly those who are isolated, where the need is greatest," she says.
But on a national scale, Fergusson warns against jumping straight into screening the whole population, arguing that services have to be built up first.
"The prevalence of conduct disorder is about 5 per cent. That's 3000 or so in each year. Multiply by 16 for the age group zero to 16 and that's 48,000 children. That's way too large for any system to deal with them effectively now.
"So let's set up systems to treat referrals that we are already getting from schools and preschools and Child, Youth and Family. We have to provide proper services for those referrals.
"I keep telling them this is a 15- to 20-year project. We need to start small."
On the web:
www.familyworks.org.nz
www.werrycentre.org.nz
