If you want to improve relationships with your children and learn about effective alternatives to smacking and corporal punishment, you need our Common Sense Parenting Course!

Parents who've completed the workshop report greater parenting satisfaction and efficacy, better relationships, increased satisfaction with family functioning and fewer child behaviour problems.

‘Very helpful and constructive’ ... ‘The programme is good for people who struggle with disciplining their children' ... ‘You learn to think on your feet and stay calm in the moment’ ... ‘A calm, polite, but focused approach’ and ‘It will even improve my interactions with friends, particularly when we have argumentative discussions’ are just some of the comments we've received.

The 12-hour workshop helps improve relationships and strengthen family bonds by building on the parents’ existing parenting skills; it offers effective ways of discipline that reduce disruptive and aggressive behaviour – and it develops new ways to deal with challenging behaviours.

Over the past few years, we have worked with education departments, parents and professional family workers and organisations and have effectively helped and trained more than 300 parents through the Common Sense Parenting workshops. We’ve also reached 167 schools, 3 523 educators and impacted on the lives of more than 102 500 learners through the Well-Managed Classroom programme – and the demand continues.

If you'd like to find out more, contact the Girls & Boys Town Training and Resource Centre on (011) 482-2655 or (021) 939-8085.

Well-Managed Classroom

Crowded classrooms, overburdened educators, lack of discipline, drugs and other social challenges are putting our education system under severe pressure.

For the past five years, Girls & Boys Town has been working on programmes to address these issues – developing and introducing our Well-Managed Classroom programme into more than 270 schools, reaching over 180 000 pupils.

The benefits of this programme are that educators spend more time focussing on academic learning and less time on dealing with difficult learner behaviours. Learners are motivated to adopt a culture of education and learning, while teachers are given valuable guidelines on how to handle discipline in class

Schools want, and need, this programme – because it works!

Ultimately, we hope the government will fund the programme in every school. But in the meantime your support is what enables us to take it into schools, including those our own children attend.