PUBLIC LECTURE: Transforming the Lives of Children, Parents and Communities through Positive Parenting: myth or reality?

The 2017 inaugural Robin Winkler lecture by Professor Matthew Sanders, Director, Parenting and Family Support Centre and Professor of Clinical Psychology, The University of Queensland.

This presentation will focus on the critical role of evidence-based parenting programs in the prevention of serious social, emotional and behavioural problems in children and child maltreatment. The impact of parenting on parental and child capacity to self-regulate and its impact on various aspects of development and wellbeing with be discussed. Learnings from large scale population-level implementation of evidence based parenting and family support interventions will be highlighted. The focus will be on the importance of using evidence based interventions, that are culturally informed, and have contemporary relevance to parents in an age of technology. Professor Saunders will attempt to answer the question “What we need to do as a community to shift the needle on child maltreatment and enhance children’s wellbeing at a whole of population level.”

Professor Sanders is considered a world authority on the development, implementation, evaluation, and global dissemination of evidence-based parenting and family intervention programs. He is the founder of the widely acclaimed Triple P-Positive Parenting Program developed under his leadership at the Parenting and Family Support Centre at the University of Queensland.

This lecture commemorates the work of Robin Winkler, a highly influential teacher and researcher whose work was guided by humanitarian values and a relentless questioning of accepted orthodoxies. He died at the age of 43 while heading the UWA clinical masters program at the Psychology Clinic, which now bears his name. In the Oxford Handbook of the History of Psychology he is described as “a singular, crusading figure” in Australian psychology.

This lecture is co-hosted by the UWA Institute of Advanced Studies and the School of Psychological Science.