No.

While TOPP was created specifically with Black families in mind, parents from many racial, ethnic, cultural, and religious backgrounds have participated in TOPP workshops and used TOPP information and tools, including White, Asian, Hispanic, Latino, Native American, Jewish, and multiracial parents. Participants consistently report that the principles and tools are relevant, practical, and beneficial to their families.

Many parenting programs focus primarily on children's behavior and what parents should do about their children's behavior.

TOPP focuses on what we parents bring to our parenting—our beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, emotions, experiences, and assumptions—and how those things influence our outlook, decisions, responses, expectations, and relationships with our children.

TOPP recognizes that parenting is not simply about what we do. It is also about what we believe, how we think, how we feel—including how we feel about being a parent—and what we have learned from our own life experiences.

TOPP creates a safe, supportive environment in which parents can honestly examine both the strengths and struggles they bring to parenting, including understandable feelings, beliefs, and behaviors that may have been shaped by their own upbringing, experiences, and life circumstances.

By helping us parents better understand ourselves, TOPP helps us become more aware, intentional, and effective in creating and protecting the environments our children need to grow and thrive.

In short, many parenting programs focus on changing children. TOPP focuses on developing parents.

Reason #1 - Because parenting is one of the most important responsibilities most of us will ever have, yet this society does not routinely equip its citizens with the information, tools, and support needed to intentionally create and protect the home, school, and community environments in which our children grow up.

Reason #2 - We parents deserve to be equipped, and our children deserve equipped parents.

Reason #3 - Most of us are making it up as we go along—either repeating the patterns we experienced growing up or swinging to the opposite extreme. Doing that doesn't work; our current family and community conditions as a group prove that.

Reason #4 - If we want different, better outcomes for our children, we must invest in the people our children experience most. That's us.

Reason #5 - Parenting education helps us better understand ourselves, our children, and the factors that influence both our decision-making and their development, so we can parent more intentionally and create stronger, closer, more successful families.

Reason #6 - Parenting education is an investment in Self-Care, Preventive Care, and Mental Wellness. Have you ever tried to build or repair something without instructions? How frustrating is that?

Reason #7 - Just as people invest in learning how to succeed in their careers, manage their finances, or improve their health, parenting education is an opportunity to invest in ourselves, our children, and our family's future generations—because we're not just raising our children; we're also raising our grandchildren.

Reason #8 - Parenting education is an investment in Self-Development, Professional Development, and in Family. For generations.