Parenting Class Aims at Growing Concern : Family: Pilot program seeks to help adults bolster children’s confidence and responsibility.

At nearly 2 years old, Jessica Walker is learning a new word each day.

But while her parents, Jeannette Villanueva-Walker and Kenneth Walker, struggle to keep up with their daughter’s rapidly expanding vocabulary, their greater concern is Jessica’s future.

Mainly, they worry about whether she will have enough self-esteem to be successful in life. The couple wonder how they can help imbue their daughter with a strong sense of self.

When Jessica was about a year old, the Camarillo couple began shopping around for parenting classes that focused on building a child’s confidence.

What they found was a limited number of private classes that were too expensive and did not offer day care. Others focused only on solving specific challenges--such as bed-wetting or biting other children--none of which were a problem for Jessica. Some were targeted at parents of unruly teens. Still others were designed for abusive parents who were mandated by the court to attend special parenting-skills classes.

Few were intended to make good parents of young children even better.

“This is the most important job that I do,” said Villanueva-Walker, who runs a public relations office out of her home while working full time at Ventura College as a marketing specialist. “And nobody teaches you how to do it.”

But now, thanks to a $2,100 grant from the Ventura County district attorney’s office, she, her husband and a small group of other parents will take part next month in a pilot parenting program whose aim is not to fix problems common to child development or mend fractured parent-child relationships.

Instead “Strong Parents, Strong Families” is designed to teach parents to build their child’s confidence and sense of responsibility, with the ultimate goal of preventing eventual problems that afflict many of today’s teens.

Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. Don Coleman said the program is one way his agency is trying to help parents become “active participants” in raising their children.

“We are trying to help parents as much as possible as a way of helping kids, so that they progress and mature and do not become names on case files within our office,” he said.

The program, offered free with on-site, bilingual day care, will be operated through Ventura College for parents of 2- through 7-year-olds.

If the first nine-hour workshop--to be broken up into six 90-minute classes--is successful, the district attorney plans to continue funding the program with hopes of expanding it to other schools across the county, Coleman said.

Already, the Ventura and Ojai unified school districts have taken an interest in the pilot program, which will initially be taught at Montalvo Elementary School by child care professionals and Ventura College instructors.

The primary goal of the program is simply to help parents learn how to “build a good person,” said Tammy Hassell, who teaches child development at Ventura College.

In addition to taking a preventive approach, the program is distinctive in mingling parenting techniques and child development theory, she said.

Most parenting classes focus only on techniques. When these methods fail to work in a real-life situation, they are often abandoned by parents.

“This is not a cookbook approach where parents will be given two or three ideas that may or may not work for them,” Hassell said. “We will be making specific recommendations, but parents will also be told why . . . so that if the [advice] doesn’t work with their child, they can develop child-specific activities.”

Though children’s self-image will be a key component of the course, instructors will also promote responsibility and discipline, principles that were largely abandoned in the late 1980s as parents focused on empowering their children with positive feedback, Hassell said.

“We will emphasize that self-discipline is an important preparation for success in school and life,” she said. “The program is designed to help parents see that self-discipline is a good thing.”

The program will also stress the value of parental role models.

For instance, to demonstrate the importance of social responsibility, parents may take their children with them to deliver food to a homeless shelter or ask them to help pick out toys to donate to a Christmas drive.

“This is something a lot of parents give lip service to but they never actually model it,” Hassell said.

Other child development specialists have praised the idea of the program.

Nancy Loman, another child development instructor at Ventura College, says such a program is sorely needed.

“They are surprisingly not available,” said Loman, who also conducts parenting workshops throughout the county. “But it is becoming a much more popular notion.”

Though supportive of parenting programs, Tom Prinz warns that they can’t solve a parent’s personal problems, which are often the source of bad parenting. Prinz, a Ventura marriage, family and child counselor, is the author of “Dragon Slaying for Parents: Removing the Excess Baggage So You Can Be the Parent You Want to Be.”

“There are a lot of good programs out there,” he said. “But what I have learned is that you can praise your kids and all that, but if parents have a lot of excess baggage to deal with themselves, they will be unable to do those things.”

Planners of “Strong Parents, Strong Families” agree, but say the program is a good start.

Deborah Ventura, the humanities instructor at Ventura College who originally proposed the idea to the district attorney, hopes the program will spread through the county.

“People talk about it all the time,” she said. “They say, ‘Golly, I wish there was some parenting class I could go to.’ Yet we wait to educate the child when we could be educating the parents.”