Parenting Classes in Prisons? Why?

Parenting Classes in Prisons

A remarkable woman, who is intensely interested in parenting issues, recently contacted me about our well established DVD Parenting with Dignity Curriculum. This lady is the dedicated mother of an inmate in the New York State Corrections system. Her son is a fine young man who made one terrible mistake!

She tells me that recently the State of New York has made a rather significant change in the direction of incarceration from being mostly a punitive system to one that is aiming at rehabilitation. I commend New York State for this change. Parenting with Dignity is quite active in some other Correctional Facilities in a number of other states that also have a similar rehabilitative approach toward incarceration. Many of these institutions offer a wide variety of programs for inmates to earn the right to attend educational curriculum which offer huge opportunities for inmates to profit greatly from their time in prison. (This lady's son is now pursuing a college degree via correspondence while he is serving his time.)

PW Has Success in a Prison Setting

The directors of Educational Programs of many of those other institutions tell us that our Parenting with Dignity Curriculum is very positively received by their inmate populations. They tell us that our Parenting with Dignity Curriculum is about the only program they can put on a DVD player and leave the room; and then upon return, the participants are either still watching intently or have stopped the DVD, and are discussing the material presented! As a matter of fact a number of the prisons are running our program as a peer-run and peer-facilitated curriculum!

Our Well Designed and Extremely "User-Friendly" Website

If you would like to see a little bit about what we do, our website is: http://www.parentingwithdignity.com/. If you do visit our particularly well designed website, I would like to suggest that you place your pointer over the word HOME in the Menu across the top of the Home Page. When the drop-down menu appears select the TAKE THE TOUR option that is highlighted in orange. (Or you can just click on this link: http://parentingwithdignity.com/tour/index.htm )

When you do that, the website will take you on a short tour of our program to allow you to see, in some detail, what the curriculum is all about. Please note that you can preview a short segment of each lesson at the page labeled DVD Series ( http://parentingwithdignity.com/PWD/video_series/index.htm ) .

The Parenting with Dignity Philosophy for raising self-reliant children is based upon the simple truth that children will make ALL of the big decisions in their lives. So it is the premise of Parenting with Dignity that in order to effectively raise children, parents must teach them how to make good decisions!

I believe that the reason that the course is so well received by prison inmates is that they realize the consequences of poor decisions! And, they are intrigued by the manner in which the course teaches parents how to teach children to make good decisions. As a matter of fact, while in the process of thinking about how they might teach good decision-making to their children, many of the inmates, for the first time in their lives, seem to engage in the task of teaching themselves to make good decisions!