The Incredible Years® (IY) is a suite of prevention programs designed to increase a child’s success at school and at home by promoting positive parent, teacher, and child relationships.
The program components have been shown to improve school performance, reduce child behavior problems, promote positive and consistent discipline and support caregivers through a holistic approach involving children, parents and teachers.
Program Approach
IY addresses the unique needs of each audience through distinct yet integrated components and skill-building programs. Each component has been created to be culturally responsive and developmentally and age appropriate.
Teacher Program Management (TCM)
Teachers learn positive teaching strategies and essential skills for classroom management including how to connect to children with challenging behaviors and how to help them manage their emotions.
Dinosaur School
60 lessons delivered to children 2-3 times per week. Trained teachers co-lead lessons using puppets to engage in activities that focus on problem solving, self-monitoring emotions, anger management, and how to make friends.
Preschool BASIC Parent Program
Delivered through a series of 14 weekly parent group meetings. Trained facilitators guide groups of 7 to 15 parents as they learn strategies and skills that promote children’s social competence and reduce behavior problems (e.g. how to play with their children; social, emotional, academic and persistence skills coaching, effective praise, and use of incentives).
Invest in Kids' Role
Community Planning
Ensures that all local communities who use or plan to use IY have the knowledge, skills and support needed to support high-quality program delivery and sustainability of the program.
Training, Coaching, and Fidelity Monitoring
Ensures that all implementers are prepared and supported in delivering IY to diverse communities and families.
Evaluation
Our entity-specific and statewide process and outcomes evaluation gives us the data we need to assist implementing entities in using outcomes for quality improvement.
Advocacy
Protects state funding for IY through education and advocacy.
Results
In order to demonstrate that we are successfully bridging the gap between research and practice, it must be shown that our locally implemented programs achieve results annually that are similar to those produced in the research, which began in 1982. Numerous studies since that time have documented IY's effectiveness in promoting young children's social-emotional skills and teachers' positive classroom management strategies, improving parenting practices, and strengthening teacher-child and parent-child relationships. To that end, we evaluate the IY components annually and our role in implementing them.
2022-2023 Numbers Served
6,274
students served by Dinosaur School
561
educational staff and parent program
facilitators ensured the successful
delivery of Dinosaur School and Parent Program
474
participants were served by the
Preschool BASIC Parent Program
The Incredible Years Annual Report 2022-2023
In 2022–2023 statistically significant gains in IY outcomes included:
- Dinosaur School students' Social-Emotional Competence, including Emotion Regulation, Prosocial Communication, and Academic Skills
- Students' Dinosaur School social-emotional skills
- Parents’ use of Appropriate Discipline, Clear Expectations, and Positive Parenting
- Parents’ use of Harsh Discipline and Inconsistent Discipline
- Children’s Social-Emotional Competence, including Emotion Regulation and Prosocial Communication
If you are interested in learning more about the student and teacher data that we collect as part of our statewide Dinosaur School and TCM evaluation, please click here to see the IIK-IY Classroom Data Use and Privacy Policy Statement.