A Snapshot of Clinical Psychology Trainees’ Exposure to Parenting Approaches and Attitudes Toward Child Rights

PurposeClinical psychology graduate trainees may pursue training in child, youth, and family services, which often encompasses the delivery of parenting interventions. Two broad and fundamentally different parenting approaches are Parent Behaviour Management and Positive Parenting. We examined the types of parenting approaches to which child/family clinical psychology trainees were exposed, along with their attitudes toward child rights and punitive parenting.Major FindingsWe collected data for 73 Canadian doctoral students. For the subset of 54 child/family trainees, about one-third were not exposed to any parenting programs in clinical supervision or coursework. The remaining students learned about programs that fell within a Parent Behaviour Management approach only or within both Parent Behaviour Management and Positive Parenting. The majority (90.4%) of the larger sample were not familiar with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, although their child rights attitudes were highly favourable and associated with lower punitive parenting approval.ConclusionsThese preliminary findings suggest that clinical psychology trainees are learning about the two broad parenting approaches. However, they do not have much training in children's rights, which is concerning given the associations with punitive parenting attitudes and the importance of centering children's perspectives in clinical work with parents.