Evidence and Policy: Exploring the WHO Parenting Intervention Guidelines

Event Details

Child maltreatment is a significant global public health issue, with parents and caregivers being the most common perpetrators. The WHO has recently released guidelines on parenting interventions to prevent maltreatment and enhance parent-child relationships for children aged 0-17 years.

Join Prof Frances Gardner and Sophia Backhaus, who led the team developing these guidelines, for a webinar exploring the policy recommendations of the guidelines as well as the underlying evidence from 65 countries in every region of the world. Beyond the question of whether parenting interventions are effective across different settings and subgroups, this webinar will also present evidence related to other key issues for making decisions about policy and practice, such as their cost effectiveness, balance of harms and benefits of parenting interventions, equity effects, social acceptability, and whether parenting interventions are in accordance with principles of human and child rights.

You can review the guidelines here.

This event is part of our Global Parenting Initiative Open Webinar Series.

 

This event has passed, but you can view a recording of the webinar on YouTube.

 

https://www.youtube.com/embed/JHuJ-7GpNio

 

 

Presenters

frances gardner

Prof Frances Gardner

Prof Frances Gardner is the Senior Research Investigator for the GPI. She is also a Co-Principal Investigator for Parenting within the Preschool System in Malaysia and a Co-Investigator for Parenting on the Thailand/Myanmar Border and Parenting within the Public Health System in Thailand. She is a Professor of Child and Family Psychology at the University of Oxford and Co-Director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Intervention at the University of Oxford. Her 30-year career in parenting research involves developing, testing, and scaling up parenting interventions in many countries, including Parenting for Lifelong Health (PLH) in low- and middle-income countries, with projects in Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, and Africa. Her parenting evaluations and systematic reviews are highly cited (over 17,000 times), including seminal studies of the transportability of parenting interventions across cultures and countries, their essential components, and analyses to understand for whom these interventions are most effective.

She works closely with policymakers, and led the team conducting the systematic reviews for the new WHO Guideline on Parenting Interventions. Her work has influenced government and NGO parenting policy in many countries and regions, working with UNICEF, UNODC, WHO, EU, UK National Parenting Academy, and government ministries of many countries. In 2019 she also received the Nan Tobler Award for Review of the Prevention Science Literature from the Society for Prevention.

sophia backhaus

Sophia Backhaus

Sophia Backhaus is a doctoral student at the Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford. She was a core researcher on the WHO Parenting Guideline Development Project and was entrusted to write the Guidelines. Her research focuses on the effectiveness of parenting interventions to reduce violence against children. She is also interested in measurements of violent parenting behaviours. Sophia has worked with the World Health Organization on projects related to violence against children, parenting, and early childhood development.