Family Nights help deal with raising children

COLUMBUS - Raising children can bring rewards and exhaustion.

The Columbus Collaborative Team (CCT) is attempting to maximize the former and minimize the latter by offering Family Nights.

Since 2003, CCT has hosted a series of Family Nights during the school year with each session focusing on parenting methods and how to positively interact with and influence children.

All sessions are free of charge.

The Children & Families Committee of the collaborative will host the first family night of the year from 6-8 p.m. Sept. 20, at St. Isidore School, 3821 20th St. Child care and a dinner of pizza and pasta will be provided free of charge with advance registration.

Tammy Bichlmeier, executive director of CCT, said although the schedule varies they try to conduct a session each month from September to March of each school year.

The purpose behind the events are “to make information available on various parenting related topics to the community and try to make it as easy as possible to attend by providing a free meal and free day care,” Bichlmeier said.

Before 2003, CCT offered four-week classes with each class lasting two hours and although those were pretty well attended, she said, CCT wanted to reach out to more people.

So the collaborative began the Family Nights program, modeled after a similar project in Seward, which holds sessions monthly covering different topics and reaching out to churches and other community organizations to help provide locations, meals and child care to make attendance more convenient, Bichlmeier said.

CCT focused on “parenting because it has been identified as an issue in both of our last two community needs assessments,” she said. “We have generally gotten a really, really positive response on most of the presentations” in the response evaluations.

Some of the topics that have been covered are the importance of music to young children, dealing with different personality types within a family, identifying dangers and warning signs of drug use and kindergarten readiness.

Two of the most popular sessions, Bichlmeier said, are helping with homework and how to discipline a child.

“Each year we try to do some that would attract parents with different aged children from young kids (through the) teenage years,” she said.

This year's first Family Night, “The Message Behind The Behavior,” will focus on some common triggers for frequently observed problem behaviors such as whining, lying, talking back or shutting down and cover how to identify recurring scenarios and ways to approach an unhappy child to redirect him or her without shaming or unintentionally escalating the behavior.

The presentation will be conducted by Nancy Thompson, who is an licensed mental health practitioner and certified professional counselor. Thompson works as a child and family therapist with a private practice in Omaha.

The workshop is open to all parents, educators and care providers interested in improving their skills in working with children. An interpreter can be made if available if such a need is indicated on the registration form.