The future of parenting programs: Implementation

This article examines the role that implementation science can play in evidence-based parenting programs. Although parenting programs can support parents in their caregiving roles, adapting and taking an evidence-based approach from one place to another without attending to implementation factors may contribute to poor impact in a new setting. Implementation science enables researchers to move beyond monitoring and evaluation of outcomes of a parenting program to understanding the process of putting the program into practice. Factors such as whether the program meets the needs of families and communities, how to secure buy-in from key stakeholders, what training and supervision are needed for the workforce, and ways that parenting programs can be integrated in existing infrastructure are all critical to successful implementation. Quality improvement can be built into the implementation process through feedback loops that inform rapid changes and testing cycles over time as a program is implemented. If researchers lead initial implementation of parenting programs, they must determine how the program can continue to work when using community workers and local systems rather than researchers. Open access components are especially important for the implementation of parenting programs in low- and middle-income countries to avoid prohibitive costs of proprietary programs and to benefit from flexibility in adapting components to meet the needs of particular local populations. Parenting programs benefit when policy makers, program leaders, and researchers attend not only to the what but also to the how of implementation.