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A Review of Parenting Sites on the Internet
for the CSAP Workplace Managed Care Program


Daniel Maliszewski
Center for Substance Abuse Prevention

June 22, 1999

Employees who come from happy homes may be more likely to perform better at their jobs than those who don't. Stressed out parents come to work and have difficulty focusing on what they are supposed to do. For this reason, many companies believe it is important to include parenting programs in their health care benefits. Parenting programs have helped improve employee attitudes, spirit, and efforts at the worksite.

This Internet study was undertaken to learn about the basic components of parenting programs offered by Workplaces, hospitals, and health centers. The initial search terms included: "Parenting programs," "Mothering programs," and "Fathering programs". The search was undertaken in June 1999. The following search engines were used:
  1. www.hotbot.com
  2. www.altavista.com
  3. www.yahoo.com
  4. www.lycos.com
  5. www.ask.com
  6. www.excite.com
  7. www.infoseek.com
The search produced 145 Web sites (see Appendix 1). The majority of the Web sites were from the United States. 23 were from Canada, and 11 were from Australia.

The following were our results:

Parenting Programs
Component

Number of Web
sites identified

Percentage of 
Web sites
identified
Parenting Skills 122 84
Support Groups 38 26
Products 11 8
Grandparenting Skills 7 5
Divorce 5 3
Step-Parenting 4 3
 

Parenting skills programs (84% of sites identified) focus on developing communication, discipline, and child raising skills. Support groups (26%) help with issues of raising a family. Some companies just have products (8%) to loan or sell such as videos, brochures, and books. Grand parenting skills (5%) are aimed at those who have to take care of their children's offspring. Divorce programs (3%) assist employees who are co-parenting through a divorce. Step-parenting (3%) has the lowest percent of programs in health care programs.

Although an intensive review of the Web sites produced these findings, the reader is cautioned not to expand interpretation of the data to more than parenting programs presented on certain Web sites. Future research on this subject could be useful to determine how many people use these Web sites and how effective the sites may be in assisting the user to have more healthy lifestyles.

Appendix 1: Web sites searched