Introduction
This Practice Guide relates to all outcomes of the National Framework for Children’s Social Care (CSCNF). The enablers of the CSCNF (leadership, workforce, multi-agency working) have a role in supporting delivery of this guide’s key principles and recommendations. This summary online version complements a full version of the guide available to download here.
This Practice Guide sets out key principles and recommendations on parenting support for parents who have babies and children aged between 0 and 10 years old, based on the best available evidence.
The Guide focuses on support for parents whose circumstances include adversities that undermine their skills, abilities and/or resources. These adversities can include poverty, substance misuse, intimate partner violence, conflict in the couple relationship, and parent mental health challenges. Adversity can create challenges for effective parenting and increase the risk of child abuse and neglect. Effective parenting programmes can help to strengthen families’ response to, and resilience in the face of challenges and improve both parent and child outcomes.
What do we mean by parenting support?
The core purpose of parenting support is to strengthen parenting capacity and support parents to make lasting change to improve child outcomes. Parents in England can interact with the end-to-end system of parenting support and protection, from universal services (e.g. Family Hubs), through Family Help, to the edge-of-care.
For the purposes of this Practice Guide, we are referring to parenting interventions with defined eligibility criteria that have a clear structure and set of activities. We use the World Health Organisation definition of a parenting intervention.
Find out more about definitions and scope related to this guide.
We would like to acknowledge the invaluable input of our Parenting and Experts by Experience Advisers who worked closely alongside our Guidance Writing Advisory Group to develop this Foundations’ Practice Guide: Victoria Agnew, Southwark Council; Kar-man Au, Relational Activism; Nicki Cooper, Suffolk County Council; Pasco Fearon, University of Cambridge; Emma Ford, Warrington Borough Council.
We would also like to thank the Centre for Evidence and Implementation and their collaborators for their work on one of the systematic reviews that underpins this Practice Guide.
