Enhancing the Abilities of Child Protective Services Workers To Provide Parent Education to Clients.

An inservice training program to enhance the ability of child protective services (CPS) workers to provide parent education to their clients was developed and tested with CPS workers in a rural Ohio county. The CPS workers' need for training in delivery of parent education was assessed through an 11-item pretraining survey that was completed by 20 of the county's 22 intake and outgoing social workers. The training program that was developed focused on parenting defiant children and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The training program, which consisted of 10 weekly sessions that were attended by 58% of the individuals completing the pretraining survey, focused on increasing CPS workers' knowledge of managing behavioral problems and ADHD, ability to locate available parent education resources, and understanding of how to use the resources with parents. The 11 CPS workers who completed the training and the posttraining questionnaire credited the training program with increasing their levels of knowledge, awareness of available resources, and ability and willingness to use those resources to provide parent education to clients. (The bibliography contains 92 references. Appended are the following: weekly calendar of planned activities, pretraining survey cover letter, pretraining survey, and posttraining survey.) (MN)