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Interview with Jody Kussin, PhD

Jody Kussin
Catches Them Being Good


Jody Kussin, PhD, former program director for the PGI Clinical Psychology Doctoral Program, recently sat down to discuss her seminal parenting work, Catch Them Being Good, which was reissued by PGI in 2007.  Like everyone else, we were curious about how she came to write this informative book.  

When I started my post doc many years ago, I already had an interest in the area of parenting. I went to work at a child community mental health center where they couldn’t keep the parents attending the parenting classes. They were very generous, and they let me spend almost a full year researching why their program wasn’t working.  I met with the parents who dropped out and the parents who stayed in.  I also met with the primarily mental health interns who were running the group.   

It turned out that the parents by and large felt two things about the classes.  The first thing was that they felt judged by the leaders of the classes, and the second thing was that they felt like nothing was working anyway.  In meeting with the interns, they felt like the parents were beyond help when they got in the door, that there was really nothing they could do [to help].   

So I spent some time thinking about this and sifting through their answers and I realized that what was missing was that no one was focusing on the relationship either between the parent and the child or the mental health professional and the parent. There was no program in existence that focused first and foremost on how you establish a relationship and connection between a parent and a child.  There was an underlying assumption that everybody already had those.  It turns out that’s not necessarily true.   

First of all, many parents who are raising children did not get them at birth.  Some are raising foster children, or they inherited them or adopted them, or they are grandparents raising grandchildren.  Second, in many instances, even when you are raising biological children from birth, there is not an immediate bond; and even if there is, it can easily be disrupted, especially in less resourced families.   

In the meantime, society does judge the parent harshly for the child’s errors and mistakes, and so the parents are constantly in trouble.  In turn the parents are constantly sure their children are in trouble.  So we have this negative cycle going on where the parents were themselves never caught being good.  Then to add the third layer, it turned out that the mental health professionals themselves felt like they were not being caught being good because the parents would come to the class and drop out, because they couldn’t keep parents in the class.  So we have kind of a three-tiered cycle of negativity.   

So I decided what we needed to do was address all three of these areas, and I need to write a program where the emphasis is on catching everyone being good.  So the assumption is we are talking about parents who catch their children being good, which is certainly a piece of it, but in and of itself, that wouldn’t be sufficient.  We need the interns to catch the parents in the program being good, and we need agencies to catch the interns being good.  So those are kind of the three tiers of the book [Catch Them Being Good].  

I think we launched the first pilot group of this program probably in 1990ish, and since then, I have been running many classes and training many people.  It was published only because so many students in mental health got trained in it and went on to other agencies, and they were Xeroxing dog-eared copies of dog-eared copies of the original materials, and they said “Can you just put it in a book?  Could somebody put it in a book already?”  So Verdugo Mental Health basically said “We don’t know anything about publishing, but we will put it in a book,” which was called Catch Them Being Good. They made a ton of copies, and the copies are all gone.  You can’t find a copy anywhere, except I think Amazon has about three left, and they are charging $90. [As of publication, there are no more copies on Amazon.] So the students have taken it all over the country and Canada, and I hear back from these students, who are now licensed professionals and have been in the field for years and years, at community mental health centers and school campuses in particular, and they find Catch Them Being Good successful in helping parents establish a relationship, connection and attachment with their children.  

For information about purchasing the revised edition of Catch Them Being Good, please contact the Phillips Student Store at 818.386.5674 or buy it now at Amazon.
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