Parenting

The individual and team values for the people who work in the NES Parenting Team identified at a recent team development day are shown in the image below. We are passionate about our work making a difference to the lives of children and families and the focus of our work is detailed below.

The Parenting Workstream within the Psychology Directorate at NHS Education for Scotland (NES) works in partnership with Community Planning Partnerships (CPPs), Health Boards and individual services across Scotland with the aim of increasing the availability of evidence-based early interventions for parents, as well as training staff across the children and families’ workforce.

Our work reflects strategic national mental health and wellbeing priorities and centres around the importance of supporting strong relationships. The Parenting training offers begin with a preventative/early intervention focusing on Infant Mental Health (IMH) and includes support through pregnancy, birth and the early years. Beyond infancy, our training offers come under the Psychology of Parenting Programme (PoPP) and cover the early years, school age children and adolescents.

Interventions the Parenting workstream support include those targeting infant mental health and wellbeing, support for parents of preschool children, primary school and high school aged children, where there are concerns about their social, emotional and behavioural development. The approaches all have a shared focus of improving the relationship between the parent and child, with the aim of supporting parents to attune to their child and to provide a routine supportive, predictable and nurturing, relationship and environment, therefore, improving mental wellbeing, building resilience and reducing the risk of future mental health difficulties.

Training to increase knowledge and understanding of infant mental health as well as training in a universal approach to interacting with parents are also supported. Read more about all the Parenting training offers in our Parenting Briefing Paper and visit our Infant Mental Health page and Psychology of Parenting Programme (PoPP) page. The interventions supported by the Parenting team all aim to support the development of positive child-caregiver relationships. Relationships are at the core of all of our team’s work, and to highlight this a series of documents have been created to support the work practitioners, supporting children and families, do. They highlight the general importance of relationships as well as sharing helpful guidance about working in a trauma informed way and when using the time out approach. 

• It's all about relationships: Understanding communication, behaviour & NES Parenting offers
• It's all about relationships: Understanding trauma informed practice and the NES Parenting offers
• It's all about relationships: Time in and Time out within the NES Parenting offers

Connecting with Parents’ Motivations

The Parenting team have developed a training, Connecting with Parents’ Motivations (CwPM), which is a strength-based communication skills training system. It is designed to enhance the abilities of the early years and the wider children and families’ workforce, so that they can have more of the kinds of conversations with parents that facilitate uptake of the Parenting workstream supported interventions.

The CwPM manualised training programme is geared towards the promotion of non-judgemental, empowering partnerships between practitioners and parents. The training encourages greater use of specific strength-based communication skills that have been scientifically demonstrated to increase engagement in other therapeutic contexts. It draws on best practice examples in this area and incorporates key strategies from motivational interviewing, solution-focused and person-centred, strength-based approaches.

The Parenting team offers cascade training to staff who wish to run trainings of CwPM locally to staff, with the aim of increasing staff skills in engaging families into evidence-based parenting programmes.

For information about any of our trainings offers please contact the team at psychology@nes.scot.nhs.uk.

Early Intervention Framework

The Parenting workstream was involved in the development of the Early Intervention Framework for Children and Young People’s Mental and Wellbeing, this website includes a searchable database of evidence-based mental health and wellbeing interventions for children and young, people. Information about the interventions in presented in a structured way that supported well informed decision making when commissioning new interventions. More information about the framework can be found here - Provision of psychological interventions and therapies guide (scot.nhs.uk).