Facing an unplanned pregnancy can be a scary and uncertain time. You might be wondering whether you have what it takes to carry, deliver, and parent a child or whether adequate resources are available to support you as you face these realities before you feel ready. Willow Womens Center in Beloit, WI, is here to help. With various services, including free parenting classes for women (and their partners) facing an unplanned pregnancy, we can help you build and practice the skills you need to parent all of your children, including those who haven’t been born yet.

Overview of Parenting Classes

After learning of an unplanned pregnancy, you have three options: to terminate the pregnancy through abortion, to gift the child to another family through adoption, or to parent the child yourself. At Willow Womens Center, we often hear women say that they feel pressured to terminate because they simply don’t have the resources they need to carry the child to term or, if considering parenting, to parent a child in the way they’d like to parent him or her. That’s why we offer a series of free parenting classes. We believe all women facing unplanned pregnancies deserve access to the information and resources they need to make the most informed and empowered decision about their pregnancy without pressure or judgment. Willow Womens Center offers a series of three free parenting classes designed to address all the stages and challenges that parents might face. Whether you are pregnant with your first child or already have children at home, you will leave with new learnings that will empower you to raise healthy, happy, and successful children.

Free Parenting Program Types

Willow Womens Center offers the following classes: Early Childhood, Youth with Challenging Pasts, and Parenting with Love and Logic for all ages.

Early Childhood Program

Did you know that you need to begin setting limits with your new baby when they are as young as 8–12 months old? For many parents, the first temper tantrum can be overwhelming and lead you to question whether you really know what you are doing as a parent –– or even to give in and lean toward a trend of giving your child whatever they want to avoid conflict and what might look like hurt feelings or loss of trust.

Even the youngest children need limits in order to stay safe and learn critical self-discipline skills, which will set them up for happiness, healthiness, and success later in life.

In Early Childhood Parenting Made Fun®, parents learn through video presentations, discussions, modeling, reading, and group exercises how to:

  • stay calm even in the most stressful situations you will face as a parent
  • use the smaller natural and logical consequences of childhood to teach lessons about larger consequences later in life
  • teach your children how to solve problems
  • set limits without power struggles between parent and child
  • foster responsibility, achievement, and resiliency

This course is geared toward the parents of children under six and is even appropriate for those who are still expecting their first child.

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Parenting All Ages

Knowing how to address challenging behaviors and discipline in a healthy, loving, and productive way is one of the most difficult aspects of parenting. This program removes the ambiguity from the topic and gives you a simple approach that simply works, restoring peace in your home and empowering you to raise children who have the skills they need to cope with life’s challenges.

The Parenting with Love and Logic® program helps you create an environment that encourages that responsibility, resiliency, and achievement without power struggles and misbehavior. Using the skills you learn in this course, you will teach your children responsibility and character using natural and logical consequences, which are minor in early childhood, helping them avoid the major natural consequences that can occur when they misbehave as adults. This course is designed for parents with children of all ages.

After each session of this course, parents are challenged to consider how they can apply what they have learned at home, making the skills actionable and practical and better preparing you to put your education into practice.

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Youth with Challenging Pasts

Raising children who have experienced trauma in early childhood requires a unique skill set, but with the right approach, children with challenging pasts can lead healthy and happy lives. For many of us, our children have faced trauma despite our best intentions and sometimes through no fault of our own. Things like domestic violence, hunger, sexual abuse, or lack of attachment due to separation (like hospitalization) from the primary caregiver, post-partum depression, drug addiction, imprisonment, or other issues.

Love and Logic: Adults Supporting Youth with Challenging Pasts® can help you understand how trauma impacts development and behavior and build skills to meet the needs of children who have faced adversity in the past. The course gives you an opportunity to consider how you will apply what you learned or ‘practice,’ so you can use your new skills right away.

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Benefits of Parenting Classes

Parenting classes provide a myriad of benefits for families:

  • Improvement of parental competency, helping you feel more effective and satisfied. It can improve your attitude about parenting and even your self-esteem.
  • Parenting classes promote the use of positive practices like family routines, planned discipline, and positive language – all nurturing behaviors.
  • Improvement of your children’s behavior. Children whose parents have taken parenting classes are more likely to demonstrate sharing and empathy and less likely to demonstrate aggression and delinquency.

Additional Benefits

  • Providing an opportunity for networking. Parenting classes allow parents to connect with others facing similar challenges and even develop new relationships they can lean on while they apply what they learned.
  • Improvement of your own mental health! Parents who have access to parenting classes are less likely to develop depression, guilt, anger, anxiety, and stress.
  • Parenting classes reduce the risk of child abuse. Having these tools under your belt can help reduce the use of corporal punishment and child abuse, keeping your children healthy.