Highlights from the National Extension Parent Education Model (NEPEM)
The full version of NEPEM can be found at http://www.cyfernet.org/parenting_practices/model.html
Category: Care for Self
Practices:
•Manage personal stress.
•Manage family resources.
•Offer support to other parents.
•Ask for and accept support from others when needed.
•Recognize one's own personal and parenting strengths.
•Have a sense of purpose in setting child-rearing goals.
•Cooperate with one's child-rearing partners.
Quote: Knowing and understanding oneself, managing life's demands, establishing clear directions.
Category: Understand
Practices:
•Observe and understand one's children and their development.
•Recognize how children influence and respond to what happens around them.
Quote: Each child is different, not only in abilities, but also in the extraordinary way that he or she sees the world.
Category: Guide
Practices:
•Model appropriate desired behavior.
•Establish and maintain reasonable limits.
•Provide children with developmentally appropriate opportunities to learn responsibility.
•Convey fundamental values underlying basic human decency.
•Teach problem-solving skills.
•Monitor children's activities and facilitate their contact with peers and adults.
Quote: Laying the foundation for establishing self-responsibility in children.
Category: Nurture
Practices:
•Express affection and compassion.
•Foster children's self-respect and hope.
•Listen and attend to children's feelings and ideas.
•Teach kindness.
•Provide for the nutrition, shelter, clothing, health, and safety needs of one's children.
•Celebrate life with one's children.
•Help children feel connected to family history and cultural heritage.
Quote: Learning to attend to children's needs, building a positive relationship, sending consistent messages of love and support.
Category: Motivate
Practices:
•Teach children about themselves, others, and the world around them.
•Stimulate curiosity, imagination, and the search for knowledge.
•Create beneficial learning conditions.
•Help children process and manage information.
Quote: Parents who are the most successful motivators lovingly nurture and guide children
Category: Advocate
Practices:
•Find, use, and create community resources when needed to benefit one's children and the community of children.
•Stimulate social change to create supportive environments for children and families.
•Build relationships with family, neighborhood, and community groups.
Quote: We need parents to be the voices of the 'voteless' and to strengthen community resources.
Developed by Charles A. Smith, Dorothea Cudaback, H. Wallace Goddard, and Judith A. Myers-Walls in collaboration with extension professionals throughout the United States. This project was supported by the Extension Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Cooperative Extension Service, Kansas State University, under special project number 92-EXCA-2-0182.
Issued in furtherance of Cooperative Extension work, Acts of May 8 and June 30, 1914, in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Stanley R. Johnson, director, Cooperative Extension Service, Iowa State University of Science and Technology, Ames, Iowa.