Practitioners working with parents who are struggling with their children’s challenging behaviours need to find engaging ways to strengthen parents’ emotional regulation and attributional processes while introducing strategies that reinforce more desirable behaviours. Third Wave therapeutic approaches blend mindfulness with traditional cognitive-behavioural methods, and have gained empirical recognition and widespread popularity, including within the area of parenting.
This workshop introduces participants to key images, metaphors and mindfulness exercises from an 8-session mindfulness and imagery enhanced behavioural parenting program (Confident Carers Cooperative Kids Program, CCCK) developed over the past 20 years in Australia to improve engagement, acquisition, integration and implementation of well-proven behavioural techniques.
Powerpoint presentation of CCCK materials will be interspersed with reflective exercises that help consolidate learnings. Participants will have electronic access to CCCK one-page handouts to support their work with families.

A substantial proportion of unborn children are exposed to elevated levels of maternal stress during pregnancy (Guardino & Dunkel-Schetter, 2014). Prenatal stress, can be addressed at the couple level through dyadic coping strategies, which reflect the concept of “we-stress” the shared appraisal of stress as a common challenge faced by both partners (Brandão et al., 2019). According to Bodenmann’s (1997) systemic-transactional model, dyadic coping plays a central role in couples’ adaptation to stress.

Prenatal education provides a particularly relevant context for stress management interventions, as it promotes knowledge acquisition and behavioral change (Ickovics et al., 2007). Moreover, pregnancy is a period characterized by heightened stress but also increased motivation for change, making it a unique window of opportunity for fostering adaptive coping strategies (Quintanilha et al., 2018).
In this pilot study, we developed and evaluated a 180-minutes intervention targeting dyadic stress management within prenatal education.

Forty-two couples completed pre- and post-intervention questionnaires assessing perceived stress and dyadic coping. Multilevel models with random intercepts for couples and participant role (pregnant woman or partner) revealed a significant increase in dyadic coping over time (β = 0.31, 95% CI [0.15, 0.48], t(68) = 3.78, p < .001; conditional R² = .29; marginal R² = .07) and a significant decrease in perceived stress (β = –0.45, 95% CI [–0.65, –0.25], t(68) = –4.56, p < .001; conditional R² = .37; marginal R² = .09).

These preliminary findings suggest that the intervention was associated with improved dyadic coping and reduced perceived stress among expectant parents. Further analyses will examine whether increases in dyadic coping mediate the observed reductions in stress over time.