As a relational health practice, The Parent Program is a tool for supporting family social and economic mobility as well as children's health and learning in:
Schools or school districts
Early childhood programs
Family-centric organizations
The Parent Program, implemented in its entirety, is composed of two coaching practices—Parent Wellness Coaching, and Family Success Coaching—both led by a dedicated Parent Wellness Coach. Across these two practices, two contextual approaches are used: group-based coaching and individual coaching. The Group & Individual Coaching approaches prioritize Relational Skills to support parents to in building internal and external resources that support access to healing and self-actualization as they support their child’s readiness to learn.
While the program was designed to be implemented with all components, you may flex the scope of implementation depending on capacity constraints or programmatic priorities. We recommend starting with Group Parent Wellness Coaching, and growing the program from there.
Parent Wellness Coaching is utilized with all parents and is focused on elevating parents’ own capacity to increase protective factors, manage stress, self-actualize, and capacity to support student wellbeing. Its components include:
Group Coaching: Parent Circles
Individual Coaching: 1:1 Coaching Calls & Personal Goal Setting
Family Success Coaching (FSC) is a targeted intervention of The Parent Program for families in crisis. FSC prioritizes awareness of resources and co-created action plans so the family can address concrete needs that are affected by crisis such as housing, jobs, healthcare, and food. Its components include:
Responsive 1:1 crisis navigation coaching
Preventative community provider in-group consultations
FSC is not a requirement for Parent Wellness Coaching. Further guidance for implementation of FSC is not currently publicly available.
The Parent Program was created at The Primary School. It was designed to be delivered by a team of Parent Wellness Coaches hired to expand the norms of a school's capacity to partner with parents. The program experience evolved over time with the feedback and partnership of the parents that were served. Implementation resources live on as a legacy offering for family engagement and owe their value to the families and staff of The Primary School’s East Palo Alto and East Bay school communities who forged this approach from 2016 to 2026.
The Primary School has other codified ECE & K-8 wraparound programs that can be adopted alongside the Parent Program: