Friday
Supporting Parents and Carers
Parenting can be the most rewarding thing in the world, but sometimes families can need help. Providing families with helpful guidance and support early on, as problems emerge, is key. As a practitioner, you have the opportunity to play a key role in helping families with the most common parenting challenges and getting further help when needed.
Below are some useful resources that can be used with parents or to signpost to parents so they can access directly.
Themes from local and national safeguarding practice reviews regularly highlight the key vulnerabilities of infants under the age of one.
Our newly launched Safeguarding Infants Toolkit has been designed to support professionals when working with new and expectant parents.
The toolkit provides useful resources and practical tools on ICON (coping with crying/ abusive head trauma prevention programme) and Every Sleep Counts ensuring every sleep is a safe sleep). These can be shared with parents and carers to help reduce the risk of abusive head trauma and sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) respectively.
The Hampshire and Isle of Wight Supporting Your Adolescent Toolkit, designed with parents/carers for parents/carers, provides information and help on a range of topics that can sometimes affect pre-teens and teenagers as they journey into adulthood.
The toolkit covers a wide range of themes including:
- Mental health
- Physical health
- Sexual health
- Online safety
- Keeping adolescents safe outside the home
- Relationships
- Bullying
- Identity
- Substance use
HSCP, in partnership with Hampshire Children’s Services, offer a Strengthening Parental Relationships Toolkit developed specifically for parents and carers. It includes links for further information and free courses for relationship support for parents in Hampshire and Isle of Wight. These courses support families to cope with stress, communicate better and help separated or separating parents learn to manage conflict to minimise the impact it has on their children.
The Isle of Wight Council promote the supporting families programme which offer similar resources and courses.
In both Hampshire and on the Isle of Wight there are family information hubs with advice, information and support for families:
There are many organisations that can provide practical advice and help on supporting children and families.
Family Information Hubs
Family Information Hubs provide advice, information and support for families in their local area. Select below for further information:
Hampshire Family Information and Services Hub
Isle of Wight Family Information Hub
Signposting for parents and carers
Select your local area below to find a list of useful agencies that can provide help and support for parents and carers on a wide-range of topics including domestic abuse, mental health, education, bullying and online safety.
Signposting for children and young people
Children and young people can access help and support from a range of organisations on various topics including healthy relationships, bereavement and loss, mental health and bullying. Select your local area below for more information:
Messages from senior managers
We have spoken to senior managers across our partner organisations to find out what safeguarding means to them. Play the video below to see what they had to say:
Carol Attrill, Early Help and Family Hubs, IOWSCP
If you do one thing…
Take a look at the If you do one thing section of the Safeguarding Children Week website to access all of our key messages for professionals.
Twitter posts will be posted throughout the day in support of Safeguarding Children Week – search for #Safeguardingchildren2023