Practicum and Internship Opportunities at the Parenting Clinic

Graduate students in psychology, nursing, education, social work, and counseling can receive training in our child and parent programs by participating in a practicum or internship experience. Our training model places students with our experienced group leaders so that they can observe the group process. As students become comfortable with the content and process of our groups, they may gradually take on more leadership roles under the supervision of our experienced leaders. Students receive 3-4 full days of training in either program and attend weekly group supervision.

Parenting Group Internship or Practicum Experiences Students will be placed in one of our parenting groups where they will observe and assist in the delivery of our parenting program.

Additional Internship or Practicum Experiences Students who are participating in either the child or parenting practicum can obtain additional training hours in the early fall and late spring by participating in home interviews and child assessments for families enrolled in our project.

Information about Internship and Practicum Experiences

We frequently receive requests to complete an internship, practicum, or research experience in our clinic. These requests come from graduate students, post-doctoral students, or community practitioners. Our clinic can be an excellent training opportunity, and we truly enjoy working with trainees. Many students have attended training, learned to deliver our interventions, used our data to complete dissertations, and assisted with our assessment procedures. Some of these students have gone on to become a regular part of our research team or to continue research or training in our program at other sites.

Here are some things to know if you are considering working with us:

• We are not primarily a training site so our grant goals always come first. Luckily, since our grants involve direct training and services to parents, schools, and children, trainees have the opportunity to participate in hands-on training and intervention. However, some flexibility is required, and grant goals and activities vary from year to year and from month to month (often we have no intervention in the summer, assessments in the fall, intervention in the winter, and assessments in the spring).
• We do not have an APA-approved internship program. It is the trainee's responsibility to keep track of APA requirements and to ensure that all requirements are met. Trainees may need to seek additional experiences outside of our clinic to meet their program requirements. Several students have successfully completed APA internship requirements, with some creativity.
• Practicum experiences can range from 6 hours per week to full-time work and can last from 4 months to a full year. We almost always require that a student participate for a full intervention period (4 months). Start times of interventions vary, but most begin in the late fall and continue until the spring.
• Our training model is to have trainees participate in standard trainings in our programs and then to partner with a certified leader. We train students in how to conduct parent groups, small group child treatment, and classroom child social skills programs (availability depends on specific grant goals). Trainees are then paired with an experienced leader and assist in conducting the intervention. Depending on the trainee's prior experience and comfort level, this role may be an observer role or may involve more leadership. Trainees also participate in weekly supervision.
• Our team includes licensed psychologists, licensed social workers, nurse practitioners, and teachers. All of these staff can be involved in supervision depending on the needs of the trainee.
• We regret that we do not have funding available for trainees to learn and assist with the interventions. Occasionally, we can pay a minimal hourly rate for work that trainees do on our assessments. This is not an adequate amount to live on, so trainees must have another source of funding.
• We often hire former trainees to work on our grants. Many of our current therapists first learned our program as a volunteer or as a student.
• We have large data sets with information about families and children and schools. Over the years we have had a number of doctoral students who have used our data as the basis for their dissertations. Interested students are encouraged to contact us about this. We do not take students unless we can make a commitment to working collaboratively on a project with them, so almost all of our doctoral students have been from local universities. (Students often spend time learning our intervention before using our data). While we like to be closely involved in student research with our data, we also expect students to take the initiative on these projects and to work efficiently and proactively on their projects. We generally ask to be on a student's dissertation committee if our data is being used.

Feel free to contact Jamila Reid, Ph.D. mjreid@u.washington.edu if you are interested in training with us. In some ways we offer a very flexible and exciting internship/practicum program, but because of our grant constraints, it is not the right match for everyone.

Thank you for your interest!

Student Doctoral Dissertation Results (Julie Rinaldi, Ph.D.)

Over 60 families participated in a long-term follow-up study of the Incredible Years Program. At the time the parents received this intervention program, their children were aged 4-8 and were exhibiting significant behavior problems. Ten years later, the parents as well as their teenagers were interviewed. Results of these interviews indicated that at least 75% of the teenagers adjusted typically into adolescence with minimal behavioral and emotional problems. There were a few teenagers (approximately 10) who did have significant problems in adolescence. These teenagers exhibited behaviors including alcohol use, delinquency, and high levels of defiance or aggression. In addition, some also had elevated levels of depression, anxiety, or self-worth issues.

It is very promising that the parenting skills taught in the Incredible Years Program had lasting effects. For example, those mothers who used less critical language with their children both before and just after completing the Incredible Years program were more likely to have teenagers with a typical adjustment into adolescence (as opposed to the 10 teens who had multiple problems). In a similar way, the fathers who praised their children more frequently were more likely to have their child adjust typically into adolescence. At greatest risk for having problems in adolescence were those children who had a coercive relationship with their mothers. A coercive process develops when the child's negative behavior causes the mother to be more critical, negative, or hostile, which in turns causes the child to be more defiant. Breaking this cycle between parents and children is an important focus and continuing goal of the work at the Parenting Clinic.

These results are promising and suggest that enhancing parenting skills is a useful and important key to improving conduct problems in children and maintaining those improvements to prevent further adolescent behavior problems.

2006-2007 Interns Jani Driver Lisa Emerson