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Parents of children with chronic illnesses face many challenges not faced by other parents. A family-centered parent support and education program, Building on Family Strengths (BFS), was designed to help parents meet these challenges by gaining new skills and learning new ways to support their children. BFS researchers involved potential participant families in the refinement of the BFS curriculum to make it truly family centered. The article reports major feedback received from parent focus groups, leaders in several cultural communities, and participants in a pilot class as BFS underwent final refinement. This feedback greatly influences the development of the BFS curriculum, as without it the final product going into a randomized clinical trial would be less attuned to the needs of parents of children with chronic illnesses. Other researchers and family educators may find this feedback useful as they improve their own research and program offerings.

This research examined the behaviors children reported to be linked to their asthma flare-ups, the extent to which reported links were in the theoretically expected direction, explanatory models children gave for linkages they espoused, and the extent to which reporting a greater number of theoretically appropriate linkages was associated with a variety of asthma-related beliefs and behaviors. Most children reported that their behavior had an affect on their breathing and most often the reported impact was in theoretically expected directions (73%-100%). The ability of children to provide substantive explanatory models was more limited. Significant relationships were found between the child's number of theoretically appropriate affirmitive responses and several subsequent measures of asthma knowledge, extent of child's responsibility to implement daily asthma management by both parent and child report, child's self-efficacy rating on his or her ability to perform asthma self-management activities, and the child's report of frequency with which routine asthma management behaviors were performed.