Advancing Parenting

Advancing Parenting has requests from across the U.S. and Canada for hundreds of sets of our fifty-one parenting norms bumper stickers.  The requests come from schools, child abuse prevention councils, family resource centers, children's advocacy groups, shelters, pediatricians, and individuals.  I am applying for this grant so we can print and ship these bumper stickers.

My vision is that all children are raised by parents who engage in parenting behaviors and practices generally recognized as supporting their healthy development. 

I started the nonprofit, Advancing Parenting, in 2012.  The purpose of Advancing Parenting is to find unique and powerful ways to teach positive parenting to everyone.  We began with bumper stickers that have parenting messages on them because it was the least expensive way to get things rolling and as I stated earlier there is a huge and growing demand for them.  As funding becomes available we will use other impactful media and means to display the fifty-one parenting normss.  Examples on our website, www.advancingparenting.org.

Unsupportive and harmful parenting is the problem.  The ACE Study and follow-up studies have revealed the devastating consequences of adverse childhood experiences on children and adults and the costs associated with mitigating their effects.  The cost of aces in California alone are staggering, 112 billion dollars. 

Most, if not all, of the ten original aces are associated with unsupportive and harmful parenting.  This suggests that improving the overall quality of parenting will significantly reduce human suffering and save billions of dollars.

Countless organizations do conventional parenting education.  Parents who have hurt or neglected their children are compelled to enroll in parenting classes.  This is 99% of the parenting education that happens in the U.S.

Advancing Parenting does not do conventional parenting education.  We are pioneering a new kind of parenting education that reaches everyone, everywhere, all the time.  Right now it's bumper stickers, which are in great demand.  Later on...billboards and other means will be used to display the fifty-one parenting tips.  Visit www.advancingparenting.org to see examples and the list of bumper sticker messages.

Right now the impact is negligible because we haven't the funding to print and ship the tens of thousands of stickers that have been requested.