‘How to Argue Better’ is an online resource designed to help parents manage their stress and communicate with one another in ways that are helpful to their relationship and their children.
‘How to Argue Better’ aims to:
This guide is for practitioners who work with parents. It will show you how to introduce parents to the resource and support them as they work through it.
Before you proceed to the facilitation notes for supporting parents, we strongly recommend that you familiarise yourself with the evidence base behind the resource.
How to Argue Better is for parents who are still in a relationship with their child’s other parent and who engage in destructive conflict with their partner. It may also be beneficial to those who have significant risk indicators:
The introduction includes a video showing how children might be affected by their parents’ arguments:
The resource combines evidence-based information, activities, animations, and video clips specifically designed for this audience. Arguing better works best when both parents do it together. It is divided into three sections:
This section helps parents understand how stress affects them and their relationship. It helps parents to identify sources of stress.
This section helps parents to learn ways of coping with stress together and supporting each other.
Arguments can be constructive (helpful) or destructive (harmful). This section helps parents think about how their arguments start, and how they get out of hand. Most importantly, it will give them the skills to resolve arguments in more constructive ways.
This guide will help you to support parents working through the How to Argue Better resource. It is set up to help you work with parents in person and online.
We recommend you ask parents to work through the resource in their own time. It works best when they do it together. It will take approximately 30 minutes to work through the whole thing, or they can do it one section at a time. It follows a linear pathway to help parents progress from knowledge and understanding to skills development.
We suggest you have a follow-up call with the couple after they have completed Sections 1 and 2, and then again after Section 3 to talk about how they got on. This will give you a chance to check progress, assess understanding, and clarify any questions.
As this resource is continually being evaluated, we ask parents to answer a number of questions throughout the course. Please encourage them to complete these, and the questions under Getting started so we can find out more about the effectiveness of this resource.
