ACT

ACT’s Audience

The ACT program is an early prevention intervention focusing on parents and caregivers of young children. Its purpose is to teach positive parenting skills and practices that help create stable, safe, healthy, nurturing environments and relationships that protect children from adverse experiences such as abuse and neglect and their lifelong consequences.

Recognition of Program Effectiveness

The program is rated by the California Evidence-Based Clearinghouse as having “Promising Research Evidence”; listed as effective for parent skills training by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services/Head Start Office in the “Compendium of Parenting Interventions” as a program that has been shown to help parents; and listed by the World Health Organization as one of only three parenting programs in the “Handbook for Parenting Programmes” and by the CDC Division of Violence Prevention.

Strengths of the ACT Program

• Has universal approach and can be administered to groups of parents and caregivers from all backgrounds regardless of their level of risk as abusers.
• Has the flexibility to be hosted by a variety of institutions in an efficient and cost-effective manner.
• Is affordable and easy to implement.
• Can be integrated into an organization’s existing interventions and services for parents.
• Can complement interventions focusing on bullying prevention and intimate partner violence and can be integrated into wider community-based efforts to prevent violence.
• Has a strong evidence base demonstrating program effectiveness. Major outcomes include improving positive parenting skills; reducing coercive, harsh, negative parenting practices; increasing positive, nurturing parenting; increasing parental control and regulation of their emotions; and reducing children’s conduct problems and bullying.