In this blog, Deputy Chief Executive Donna Molloy unpacks the recommendations in the latest Practice Guide on parenting support for families facing adversity.

Today (7 February 2025) sees the launch of the second in a series of national Practice Guides commissioned by the Department of Education and produced by Foundations to support the implementation of the Children’s Social Care National Framework (CSCNF).

Aimed at local leaders and practitioners in children’s social care and health, Parenting Through Adversity (0-10) provides advice and guidance on how best to plan and deliver parenting support to families with babies and children under 10 years old who face adversity. Adversities range from structural factors such as poverty and unemployment, to substance misuse, intimate partner violence and parental mental health.

The core purpose of parenting support is to strengthen parenting capacity and enable parents to make lasting changes to improve child outcomes. Some parents facing adversity lack the resources and help to provide the supportive, loving, authoritative, and consistent family environment that children need to thrive. Inconsistent or overly harsh approaches to discipline, for example, can inadvertently reinforce and entrench child behaviours that challenge. We know that parenting support helps parents to address problems like this early, strengthens parenting skills and helps to close the widening gaps in child health and development that emerge in early childhood.

Parenting Through Adversity (0-10) is underpinned by the first review of the evidence about parenting interventions with an explicit focus on families facing adversity. It marks a significant breakthrough in our understanding of the positive difference that parenting support for these families can make to children’s behaviour, to parenting skills and to parental stress levels, among other factors. This is crucially important because we know that unless tackled, these factors can affect school readiness, increase the risk of serious harm to children and contribute to other poor outcomes for children.

The evidence in the Guide shows that parenting interventions:

• Reduce the risk of more serious harm and abuse for vulnerable children
• Improve child behaviour in both the short-term and long-term
• Strengthen the parenting skills of parents facing adversity, including those with mental health needs, and reduce parental stress
• Improve the parent-child relationship.

Based on this evidence, the Guide makes recommendations to local leaders and practitioners about how parenting support can enhance and improve their offer to families.

One of the most significant recommendations is that as part of integrated packages of support for families, evidence-based parenting interventions have a role to play in reducing the risk of more serious harm to children. When it comes to working with families on the edge of care or receiving targeted Family Help, support should include structured forms of parenting support to help keep children safe.

The strongest evidence in the Guide shows that parenting support leads to short-term and long-term improvements to child behaviour. We know that this in turn improves children’s outcomes in a range of areas and helps to prevent the escalation of early challenges, which can result in, for example, anti-social behaviour and crime, mental health problems, or non-attendance at school.

One of the most important recommendations for practice on the ground concerns parents with mental health needs. Our evidence gives local authority leaders and practitioners the confidence to offer parenting support to these parents without waiting for specialist mental health treatment to begin, because we now know that they can benefit from that support, and so can their children.

We understand that the Guide comes at a time when local authorities face considerable workforce and financial pressures, but having the best available evidence to hand will enable leaders and practitioners to scale up parenting interventions that we can confidently say have proven positive impacts on families. The principles and recommendations in the Guide will mean local leaders across children’s social care, health and other services are better equipped to co-ordinate effective multi-agency systems, clearly communicate their local parenting offer, and ensure that referral pathways are easy to navigate.

The case for improving access to proven parenting interventions has never been stronger. Evidence-based parenting support is one of the most effective ways of supporting families to provide stable, and supportive environments for children. It should be at the core of work by local authority, health and wider partners to create an effective offer of local family help. It’s time to act on this evidence and together, work to transform the lives of families and children facing adversity up and down the country.

Read the Parenting Through Adversity Practice Guide (0-10) here, and find out more about Practice Guides.

If you would like to be involved in future work on our Practice Guides, please get in touch with our team here.