The Building Early Emotional Skills (BEES) parenting program is designed to promote parent-child relationships and more optimal social-emotional development by addressing four sequentially built skills in parenting infants/toddlers: (1) building parental awareness of emotions in self and child; (2) listening and interacting sensitively; (3) identifying and labeling emotions; and (4) intentionally supporting early self-regulation skills. BEES used an 8-session format delivered in online or face-to-face platforms (N = 264 female caregivers; n = 214 online, n = 50 face-to-face). Linear mixed modeling for pre-topost changes showed significant increases in knowledge, emotion coaching beliefs, acceptance of negative emotions, and self-reported emotionally supportive responses to emotions; and, significant decreases in rejection of emotions, emotionally unsupportive responses, and parenting distress.Results suggested no differences in rate of change by program delivery type. Caregivers with more depressive symptoms showed greater improvement in their parenting distress. The BEES program may be a tool to support early positive parenting.

The term adaptive learning refers to a nonlinear approach to online instruction that adjusts to a student's needs as the student progresses through course content, resulting in a customized experience for the learner based on prior knowledge. This concept is emerging in the field of online learning. Through a project funded by the eXtension Foundation, we reviewed and conducted pilot testing on adaptive learning tools for Extension programming. We found that the adaptive learning format aided learners in mastering content. A significant contribution to the Extension community resulting from our project is improved understanding of an innovative way of teaching online.