Background and purpose: Due to their parenting styles, many parents ruin their children’s opportunity to think about the problems and find solutions for them, which may increase the likelihood of behavior problems in children. Various training packages have been designed and administered in order to help parents, and raising a thinking child is one of them. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the effects of raising a thinking child training, as a family-based training method, on problem solving, parenting style, and parent-child interaction.

Method:  The sample group consisted of Parents of 40 preschool and first grade children, who voluntarily participated in the workshop. Present research was a quasi-experimental study with pretest-posttest and without control group. The workshop included nine weekly two hours training sessions. Data were collected using parenting methods questionnaire (Shokohi-Yekta & Parand, 2006) and parent-child relationship inventory (Gerard, 1994). Parents completed the questionnaires in pretest and posttest.

Results: The findings showed that problem solving training has significantly improved parents’ parenting style (p < .01). Furthermore, the training significantly affected the subscales of satisfaction and relationship in parent-child relationship (p > .05).

Conclusion: The raising a thinking child package can help parents to use effective strategies, such as problem solving rather non-effective methods like punishment.