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The Incredible Years is an evidence-based, effective program for reducing children’s aggression and behavior problems and increasing social competence at home and at school. It is designed for 2-8 year old children and their parents or guardians. The award-winning parent training, teacher training, and child social skills training approaches have been selected by the U.S. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention as an “exemplary” best practice program and as a “Blueprint” for success program.
The Incredible Years parents and children training series has two long-range goals. The first is to develop comprehensive treatment programs for young children with early onset conduct problems. The second goal is the development of cost-effective, community-based, universal prevention programs that all families and teachers of young children can use to promote social competence and to prevent children from developing conduct problems in the first place. The purpose of the program is to prevent delinquency, drug abuse, and violence. The short-term goals are to reduce conduct problems in children and promote social, emotional, and academic competence in children. Molly Manners and Dina Dinosaur engage the children in the program from the onset which is one reason the program is so effective.
The dinosaur child training curriculum strengthens children’s social and emotional competencies. Examples include understanding and communicating feelings, using effective problem solving strategies, managing anger, practicing friendship and conversational skills, as well as appropriate classroom behaviors. The program provides a tool for counselors to treat “difficult” and highly aggressive children in small groups. Dina Program components include making new friends and learning new rules, understanding and detecting feelings, Detective Wally teaching problem solving steps, Molly Manners teaching how to be friendly, Molly explains how to talk with friends and Dina Dinosaur teaches how to do your best in school.
Topics included in the parents’ program include play, involvement, praise rewards, limit setting and discipline. Two reasons this program is successful are that it’s parent driven with parents coming up with ideas and situations and the sequence of topics which begins with child-led play.
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