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For Medical and Behavioral Professionals

When it’s time to provide patients and clients in appointments, on the phone or online, you can now feel confident and comfortable recommending and using Behavior Checker for practical advice and encouragement. Workforce research supports this call to action. Behavior Checker has been demonstrated to improve workforce confidence, comfort and competence in delivering healthy parenting in the clinic, according to "A Feasibility Study of Behavior Checker: Enhancing the Capacity of Pediatric Staff to Deliver Evidence-Based Strategies to Manage Children's Common Behavioral Issues for Parents", presented at the Society for Prevention Research in June, 2017.

What is Behavior Checker®?

Behavior Checker is an online tool, accessed from the provider's clinic laptop, tablet or desktop, to instantly provide parents with evidence-based strategies to address over 150 common childhood behaviors. The healthy parenting skills shared here promote a child’s health and wellbeing to mitigate stress so that it does not become toxic. All advice in each problem can teach a positive behavior to a child of every age doing this behavior.

And the first three steps in responding, not reacting, to a situation with a child are always the same, regardless of the age of the child:  Self-Talk and Empathy are ways to mentally prepare the parent to stop, breathe, think and practice self-control, the beginning steps to mentally prepare yourself to Teach your child the new behavior you want.

Written by parenting authors and educators Jerry L. Wyckoff, PhD, and Barbara C. Unell, this content allows healthcare providers to deliver guidance on effective discipline strategies in the clinic to help parents teach their children acceptable behaviors and protect them from harm, as recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics in their new Policy Statement, “Effective Discipline to Raise Healthy Children”.  Clinicians also refer their families to Behavior Checker through mobile-friendly, online access.

The Behavior Checker corresponds with the authors’ best-selling book, Discipline with Love and Limits, which has sold over one million copies worldwide. The proven, evidence-based strategies in this book, and in Behavior Checker, have been the foundation of the authors’ decades of experience in private practice, training programs, consultation with school districts, parenting workshops, pediatric clinics and university courses.

Medical Professionals

Behavior Checker is the only, comprehensive, evidence-based, systematic way to answer parents’ questions to over 150 of their children's most common behavior problems in the office, on the phone or online, the same way you help them manage their medical issues. With one click, you can search, print and share, to get the answers you need on your phone, laptop, desktop or tablet. To learn how, see "Become a Behavior Checker Branded Home Site" below.

The national call to action is loud and clear—The American Academy of Pediatrics is calling for pediatricians, hospitals and community agencies to partner together to support children and families—which is at the heart of Behavior Checker. In November, 2018, the Academy issued a new policy statement, that updates 20-year-old guidance on discipline. "Optimal child development requires," according the to the new AAP Policy Statement, "the active engagement of adults who, among other functions, teach children acceptable behavior." The healthy parenting skills shared here promote a child’s health and wellbeing to mitigate stress so that it does not become toxic.

Behavioral, Mental Health and Social Service Professionals

With one click, you can search, print and share, to get the answers you need for clients in the office, on the phone, or online. And here’s why it matters. The science is settled: According to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine’s report of 2019, “The single most important factor influencing a child’s healthy development is having safe, stable, and nurturing relationships with a mother, father, or other primary caregiver.” Hundreds of studies over the past several decades have demonstrated that consistently caring, supportive and protective parenting helps prevent lifelong health, learning and behavior problems, including:  obesity; depression; anxiety; suicide; substance abuse; attention and impulse control; sexual, physical, and psychological abuse; heart disease; diabetes; and cancer.

Harvard University’s Center on the Developing Child is at the heart of a myriad of research initiatives supporting healthy parenting, each demonstrating that nurturing environments and positive parent-child relationships early in a child’s life have a significant influence on a child’s health and wellbeing to mitigate stress so that it does not become toxic.

Learn how to become a Behavior Checker Home Site, which includes branding, online education and family communications material. For details, see "Become a Behavior Checker Branded Home Site" below...

  • Many pediatric mental and physical healthcare providers, and early childhood educators/daycare providers—who work to improve and protect the mental, physical, social and emotional health of children every day—are looking for strategies to participate in the national movement of “healthy parenting in primary care”.  The genesis of this movement includes acting on the urgent call to action made clear by recent scientific studies that link healthy parenting strategies during the earliest years of childhood to lifelong mental, physical and emotional health, optimum learning and positive behavior.

    Behavior Checker promotes the physical and behavioral health and emotional well-being of children from before their birth through adolescence, by integrating healthy parenting into primary care and educational and other healthcare settings to achieve optimal support for the wellbeing of children.  First piloted at KU Pediatrics in 2016, it is now expanding to other Home Sites in 2019-2020. 

    We are asking for your commitment to become a Behavior Checker Home Site. You will be joining the hospitals, clinics, daycare centers, schools, mental and behavioral health agencies and corporations who have used and refined Behavior Checker during our past decade of development. This team-tethering approach—ensuring that parents get access to evidence-based, standardized, personal parenting skill-building in partnership with their child’s trusted healthcare, educational and other support — is our Foundation’s way of supporting our mission by ensuring immediate access to universal parenting support every day. Every child deserves nothing less than the chance to build caring, responsive, protective relationships with trusted adults. And every parent deserves the same. 

    Our collaborative relationship will help us advocate for healthy parenting in primary care, mental and behavioral healthcare, and early childhood education. Early experiences affect lifelong health, not just learning; healthy brain development requires protection from toxic stress, not just enrichment. The time has come to leverage 21st century science to catalyze the design, testing and scaling of more powerful approaches for reducing lifelong disease by mitigating the effects of early adversity. Behavior Checker is just such an approach.

    Behavior Checker Branded Home Site Participation is easy:

    1. Behavior Checker Branded Home Site Professional Leadership

    The Foundation will provide each site access to the Behavior Checker online intervention that gives the Home Site professionals instant access to evidence-based, parenting prescriptions for over 175 different childhood behaviors.  Accessed on clinic computers, laptops or tablets, these standardized prescriptions for the most common childhood behaviors are shared and printed out for the parent/guardian and noted into the EHR, when appropriate, and other record-keeping devices.  Parent communications materials available for Home Site use include posters and behavior checklists and the parenting book Discipline with Love and Limits. The Home Site's branding and domain will appear on the online tool and parent communications.

    2. Workforce Education

    Prior to implementing Behavior Checker, educators, clinic providers, nurses, social workers and other staff will have the opportunity to take the online Johnson County Community College course, Parenting is Health Care®, for which CEUs can be earned.  The course objectives include:

    1) Recognize that the stress of parenting can lead to unhealthy parenting.

    2) Recognize the relationship among unhealthy parenting and toxic stress, adverse childhood experiences and long-term unhealthy physical and mental health outcomes: bullying, obesity, depression, diabetes, sexual abuse, anxiety, drug addiction, heart disease, cancer and suicide.

    3) Identify how Mind S.E.T., the Behavior Checker intervention and parent communication tools help professionals teach parents healthy parenting to prevent and reverse adverse childhood experiences and toxic stress.

    4) Identify how to integrate the Behavior Checker intervention into the organization workflow, as a systemic, standardized, universal practice to support healthy parenting and optimum health, learning and behavior.

    On-site workshops can also be scheduled to support implementation and role-play strategies.

    3. Let's get started!

    Let us send you the Behavior Checker Home Site Licensing Agreement which covers:

    • Content Licensing of Behavior Checker online tool for computer, tablet and phone
    • Your own Home Site Domain to Behavior Checker with your identity on the header and footer of the site
    • Your listing among Behavior Checker Home Sites on Behavior Checker
    • Ongoing consultation and support provided by the RLLF staff

    Education, Training and Communications Support is available, too:

    • Discipline with Love and Limits books at special Home Site Discount
    • "Parenting is Healthcare®" online course offered by Johnson County Community College (includes CEU)
    • Onsite Mind S.E.T.® workshop by Barbara C. Unell
    • Familiy communications and promotion materials with your logo and QR Code to your Home Site Domain. 
    • Ongoing consultation and support provided by the Raised with Love and Limits Foundation staff

    FOR MORE INFORMATION, CONTACT:

    Robert Unell

    Raised with Love and Limits Foundation

    info@raisedwithloveandlimits.org

  • Zero to Three

    In October, 2015, the nonprofit organization Zero to Three commissioned a survey, including a nationally representative sample of 2,200 parents of children birth to 5 years of age.  89% of respondents said they turn to medical professionals for advice, the second resource behind “the way my parents raised me”.

    In summary, the study also showed that parents:

    • Universally agree that good parenting can be learned and if they knew more positive parenting strategies they would use them.
    • Say that they feel judged almost all the time
    • Do not want to yell or raise their voice as quickly as they do, and don’t want to lose their temper as fast.
    • Say that there is so much parenting information available that it’s hard to know who to trust.

    So if healthcare professionals are advising parents agains the use of spanking and non-physical punishment that is humiliating, scary or threatening, and parents are also saying that they don't want to discipline in these ways, what do healthcare professionals recommend that parents do instead to teach good behavior and raise healthy children? That's why Behavior Checker was created.

  • The Education and the Clinical Tools to integrate healthy parenting into primary care.

    Parents are saying they need the information and trust their pediatric practice to provide good parenting strategies. And the American Academy of Pediatrics has recommended that pediatric practices provide consistent parenting information to parents.  To this end, we have teamed up with pediatricians, social workers, nurses, nurse practitioners, and parenting researchers to develop a comprehensive tool kit to bring healthy parenting into healthcare organizations who care for families with young children. 

    In your clinic, Parenting is Healthcare.

    You have always answered parenting questions in your clinic. Now Behavior Checker is an evidence-based, standardized system that gives you the way to help parents manage their children's behavior the same way you help them manage their medical issues.  

    Behavior Checker is:

    • Consistently supportive regardless of who delivers it.
    • Cost-effective and time-efficient for the parent to receive in many forms (paper, verbal, phone, tablet, AVS).
    • Part of the child's medical records across healthcare providers to check behaviors before they escalate.
    • A way to reduce the long wait times for referrals to behavioral specialists for common childhood behavior problems.
    • A way to improve workforce confidence, comfort and competence as demonstrated by a pilot site research study, "Feasibility Study of Behavior Checker: Enhancing the Capacity of Pediatric Staff to Deliver Evidence-Based Strategies to Manage Children's Common Behavioral Issues for Parents", presented at the Society for Prevention Research in June, 2017.
  • Introducing the new on-line Course: “Parenting is Healthcare”®

    The first online, continuing education course that provides the foundation your staff needs to understand the link among stress, toxic stress and parenting.  Available through Johnson County (KS) Community College, it includes an overview of the ACE Study and a review of how healthy parenting can mitigate stress from becoming toxic.  The course concludes with a review of how Behavior Checker makes it easy to deliver healthy parenting every appointment, every day for every child, just like medical care. 

    The curriculum increased workforce confidence, comfort and competence as demonstrated by the "Feasibility Study of Behavior Checker: Enhancing the Capacity of Pediatric Staff to Deliver Evidence-Based Strategies to Manage Children's Common Behavioral Issues for Parents", presented at the Society for Prevention Research in June, 2017.

    Course Description

    Parenting is Healthcare supports the call for action for healthcare, and the latest evidence for why healthy parenting is critical for a child’s development and future health. Healthcare professionals will learn how to provide parents and caregivers: standardized, evidence-based parenting prescriptions; techniques and tools that support healthy parenting while managing common childhood behavioral occurrences; and how to easily incorporate Behavior Checker into the workflow. Healthy children need healthy parenting. 

    The course objectives include:

    1) Recognize that the stress of parenting can lead to unhealthy parenting.

    2) Recognize the relationship among unhealthy parenting and toxic stress, adverse childhood experiences and long-term unhealthy physical and mental health outcomes: bullying, obesity, depression, diabetes, sexual abuse, anxiety, drug addiction, heart disease, cancer and suicide.

    3) Identify how Mind S.E.T., the Behavior Checker intervention and parent communication tools help professionals teach parents healthy parenting to prevent and reverse adverse childhood experiences and toxic stress.

    4) Identify how to integrate the Behavior Checker intervention into the organization workflow, as a systemic, standardized, universal practice to support healthy parenting and optimum health, learning and behavior.

    For more information, please contact:

    Robert Unell

    Raised with Love and Limits Foundation

    info@raisedwithloveandlimits.org

  • The first clinical, on-screen application for parenting “What to Do's”. 

    A trained staff who understands why “Parenting is Healthcare” needs the tools to answer parents’ questions about behavior the healthy way.  That’s why we developed Behavior Checker. Accessed online, it provides the instant, on-screen capability to search an extensive index of evidence-based, behavior prescriptions.

    Prescriptions for virtually every common, childhood behavior issue can be delivered in real time, during an appointment or phone call, and parents can access the same information, 24/7/365.

    Healthy discipline strategies will now be a standard part of the healthcare you provide. Behavior Checker sites, using a variety of EHR systems, are able to track data points and notate parenting consults in the patient records.

  • The 4 Behavior Checker Basics

    How Behavior Checker delivery integrates into the workflow of your clinic is dictated by your existing workflow.  We simply recommend that you include four basic steps we call The 4 Behavior Checker Basics:

    1. Give the parent/caregiver the “Ask Us about Parenting” Checklist, featuring common behavior issues, before seeing the provider.
    2. Identify the behavior issue with the parent/caregiver by looking at the Checklist, asking questions, or by observing behavior in clinic.
    3. After behavior issue is identified, prescription for that behavior issue is printed out, discussed, and information noted in EHR.
    4. Printed prescription is given to the parent, along with information on how to access Behavior Checker online.
  • How do families get the good news that your clinic is committed to healthy parenting and is the go-to resource when it comes to getting advice for solving for common behavior problems? 

    Behavior Checker includes family communications tools, in both English and Spanish, including the "Ask Us About Parenting" Checklist and posters, to build awareness that "We can help" parents "...achieve optimal health, growth, and development in their children including child behavior management", as noted in the November 2018 AAP Policy Statement.

    The  “Ask Us About Parenting” Checklist can reduce parents’ reluctance to bring up something like dawdling or whining or backtalk or tantrums, not knowing if your clinic is the place to get these resolved. It is a simple screening tool that helps parents and you get on the same page—talk the same language—about childhood behavior problems that parents are having trouble solving. 

    We provide everything you need to spread the good news that "Parenting is Healthcare" in your clinic!  

    See our Gallery of Family Communications Tools

The authors and Raised with Love and Limits Foundation disclaim responsibility for any harmful consequences, loss, injury or damage associated with the use and application of information or advice contained in these prescriptions and on this website. These protocols are clinical guidelines that must be used in conjunction with critical thinking and critical judgment.