THE PARENTING CENTER

Our mission is to provide family members and professionals with the tools, resources and services to build successful families. This is achieved through four main services, including Youth & Parent Education, Empowering Families Program and Clinical Counseling.

Through our life-changing work and strategically designed program offerings, we will continue to create pathways for our Fort Worth and Tarrant County neighbors to better navigate the stressors of life that if not given the appropriate attention, could lead to child abuse and other adverse childhood experiences. When fully engaged by clients, our efforts have the ability to enhance the welfare and safety of the children in the homes and communities we serve.


Our mission is to provide family members and professionals with the tools, resources and services to build successful families. This is achieved through the provision of carefully curated offerings and access to resources established within the following programs:

Family Life Education (FLE): Parenting education classes on more than 50 cutting-edge topics, ranging from basic parenting skills to complex issues and spanning birth through teenage years. FLE also includes self-paced online courses.

Parent Coaching: Parent Coaching program is a 10 week in-home or virtual program that creates pathways for parents to better connect with, correct and empower their children. Designed to help the family as a whole, Nest focuses on a family's strengths and identifies methods and goals to help them sustain and build upon those strengths for years to come.

Empowering Families Project: This is 6-8 week relationship-focused program to help couples learn to communicate, balance their strengths and increase teamwork. It is well known that when a couples relationship is strong, they are naturally better parents. This is a federally funded program and collaborative research study by the University of Texas at Austin.

Empowering Students Project: A relationship education based program funded by a READY4Life grant, serving Tarrant County teens in grades 9-12. Free to all participants, ESP provides a comprehensive trauma-informed, data-driven service to improve youth relationships skills, understanding of the value of marriage, and budgeting skills.

Future First: Federally funded program created to help teens make wise relationship and sexual choices. Wise choices will assist them in achieving their education, employment, relationship, and family goals, while poor choices may create barriers and adversely impact goal attainment.

Counseling Services: This program provides services for individual, family and group therapy, marriage counseling and play therapy for children as young as three years of age.

In 2024, we expect to serve 75 families across 600 sessions in our Parent Coaching Program. 90% of the parents and/or primary caregivers will show at least a 20% reduction in stress according to the Parental Stress Scale (PSS).
In 2024, we expect to serve 1050 families in our Family Life Education Program. 80% of participants will show a 20% or greater increase in their knowledge of family life skills.
In 2024, we expect to serve 400 families in our Clinical Counseling Program. 90% of clients will meet at least 75% of their personal goals. For clients exhibiting depression symptoms, a decrease by at least one level of severity (as measured by the PHQ-9)

Family Life Education

Through valid instruments, we continue to measure a growth in knowledge that our clients obtain by attending classes. We will continue to use these instruments, but also ask attendees longitudinal questions, to ensure there is a retention of knowledge that can be applied when parents are in potentially abusive situations

FLE measures the improvement in knowledge of positive parenting, relationship skills and child abuse prevention in adults and teens that increase protective factors. According to the CDC, Protective factors are efforts to improve child and adolescent health that typically address specific health risk behaviors. Studies suggest that greater health impact might be achieved by also enhancing protective factors that help children and adolescents avoid multiple behaviors that place them at risk for adverse health and educational outcomes.

By measuring the improvements in knowledge, understanding of parenting skills and raising the awareness of child abuse, FLE is also measuring improvement in protective factors. Increased protective factors lead to better environmental characteristics for children and families, thus reducing adverse childhood experiences. Pre and posttests and curriculum specific assessment inventories help FLE determine if clients have benefitted.

FLE measures the improvement of knowledge through pre and posttests that cover the following three areas.
Parental attitude that reflects appropriate expectations
Application of knowledge to case scenarios
Topic content

For Family Life Education, data is collected from pre and post tests and also the AAPI II for Nurturing Parenting Classes. While these are individual classes that can be taken multiple at a time, they can also be taken individually, for a topic of particular concern. Participants will take the curriculum-specific assessment. Each of these tests are scored by FLE staff and analyzed by the Program Director. The results are recorded in the appropriate database to determine the measure of success.

Parent Coaching uses three different assessments: The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ); The Parental Stress Scale (PSS); and The Adult Adolescent Parenting Inventory (AAPI-2). Each assessment is available in Spanish and English and will be conducted twice: wit

We are currently compiling final 2023 numbers, but in 2022, we saw a total of 3,170 clients through all our programs.