Parent Education

Do you want to increase your skills in parenting and experience a healthier family life? Being a parent is one of life’s most significant and rewarding challenges, but most parents receive little training to handle the task of raising a family. SPSCC is here to help you meet your needs – you will take part in a long-standing, successful program that educates parents and caregivers for their vital role while providing strong early learning experiences for the children in their care.

Benefits for Parents and Caregivers

Parenting Education classes help adult students become more effective and satisfied in their parenting/caregiver roles.  

Coursework focuses on:

• Social/Emotional skill building
• Ages and stages
• Brain development
• Developmentally appropriate activities for kids
• Positive discipline skills
• Parenting styles
• Self-care
• Family communication skills

What's Different at SPSCC?

Our program offers:

• Hands-on laboratory experience for parenting students.
• High quality learning experiences and environments for young children.
• Instructors who are passionate about the field and know what you need to create healthy, effective families.
• Once-a-week adult-child classes or preschool programs to meet the needs of different families.
• Opportunities to build lasting relationships with other families in the program.
• Scholarships for students.

Choices at SPSCC

We offer two parenting education class options to meet your needs:

1. Co-op Preschool Parenting Education: children enroll in a co-op preschool and parents enroll in a concurrent parenting education course(s).
2. Parent-Child Parenting Education: Parent/caregiver adult students and their children attend a once-a-week class together. Parents enroll through Capitol Forest preschool.

Co-op Preschool Parenting Education

SPSCC Cooperative Preschool Parenting Education classes provide a shared learning experience for parents and their children from birth through five years of age. Three SPSCC cooperative preschools operate from convenient locations in the Olympia area. Each school is an independent, non-profit entity run by a board and includes a skilled preschool teacher, the child’s parents/caregivers, and a parenting education faculty member.

• Capitol Forest Cooperative Preschool
  • Contact: capitolforestcoop@gmail.com / 360-459-5297
• Eastside Co-op Preschool
  • Contact: ecpmembershipchair@gmail.com / 360-218-4470
• Westside Cooperative Preschool
  • Contact: info@westsidecooperative.com / 360-866-7383

Parents/Caregivers are involved in their child's early education experience by participating in the parent-operated cooperative preschool laboratory as an assistant teacher where their child is enrolled and at parenting classes taught by an SPSCC faculty member. The faculty also advise and support the lab experience of adult students as they practice the skills they are learning while being assistant teachers in their child's preschool.

Parent-Child Parenting Education

SPSCC Parent-Child Parenting Education classes provide a shared learning experience for parents and their children from birth through five years of age. As part of Capitol Forest preschool, our courses provide a place where parents/caregivers and children learn together in a lab setting. Parent/caregiver adult students and their children attend classes once a week together. The adults spend time in lectures with the parenting education faculty, while their children enjoy an age-appropriate learning experience with a highly qualified children’s teacher. Adults spend time each class working in the lab classroom with the children, practicing the skills they are learning.