New Video

Celebrating 60 years of Gordon Training

You may have seen that we've added a new video to the website! In 2022 Gordon Training International celebrated 60 years since Thomas Gordon first developed a training programme for parents, and GTI have produced a 10 minute video that tells how it started, became successful and then expanded worldwide.

60 years is a long time - does that make it old-fashioned? Or rather, that it was visionary and fundamental? Is something newer necessarily better?

‘When Dr. Gordon taught the first P.E.T. class in 1962, parent training was a brand-new idea. At that time, most parents felt that they didn’t need training - that the way their parents had raised them was good enough.’ (Linda Adams, GTI).

The course he designed was so good that many programmes since have taken parts from it and used and adapted them. (GTI controls the source material so no-one can mimic the complete course under a different name).

Many of the components of the P.E.T. course are fully recognised nowadays as necessary skills in other important fields of communication. E.g Listening skills in Crisis Intervention, avoiding ‘Roadblocks’ in building relationships, Conflict Resolution skills in Mediation.

Other programmes came on the scene because some people had very different views on how parents should raise their children. Some courses, therefore, advocated that parents be in control of their children but the P.E.T. philosophy, showing parents how to have a collaborative, cooperative relationship with their children, is as important in the 21st century as it was in the 20th.

It is true that parents now face a number of situations that weren’t around even 30 years ago, since the arrival of mobile phones and social media for example. However the skills in the P.E.T. course are transferable - transferable from one issue/problem to another, from one family to another, from one decade to another. This is what makes it fundamental and why it can never be ‘old-fashioned’!

Some situations that are a problem for parents never change though:- issues around food, bedtimes, tv, clothes - sound familiar? P.E.T. is still here to help with those!

Language and how we express ourselves has changed over the years though. The P.E.T. book and course materials have been updated and reprinted to reflect that. The 2019 edition is available on Kindle. The previous edition [2000] of the P.E.T. book is also available via iTunes, iBook, Google Play. It’s also available in paperback in English and Spanish through GTI or Amazon.