Parenting Month Focus: Research, Innovation and Advocacy Towards Parenting Support for All

June is Parenting Month. This month, the global community celebrates the vital role parents and caregivers play in shaping our world. We also acknowledge the challenges many caregivers face and the courage, resilience, and tenacity it takes to raise safe, happy, and healthy children, regardless of the circumstances. This month, we join the call for universal parenting support to equip parents and caregivers with the knowledge and skills to help their children realise their full potential.

This month, and every month, the Global Parenting Initiative and our partners are working towards providing free, accessible, evidence-based support to every parent, everywhere, because cared-for parents with the resources to raise well-adjusted children means a better future for all.

Why universal parenting support?

Between 2019 and 2020, the World Health Organisation (WHO) estimated that up to one billion 2-to-17-year-olds experienced physical, sexual, or emotional violence or neglect. Further, 250 million children under five in low- and middle-income countries were also at risk of not achieving their developmental potential, and three in four young children aged 2 to 4 years experience regular violent discipline. Not only is child abuse and neglect linked with many mental and physical health problems for the individual, the societal and economic costs are substantial. Effects include increased risky behaviours, low educational attainment, and the intergenerational transmission of violence, costing over 5% of global GDP every year. The recent Covid-19 pandemic only exacerbated the problem, putting strain on parents and caregivers across the globe, and highlighted the urgent need for evidence-based parenting support and nurturing caregiving that is relevant and responsive to the challenges they experience.

The good news is that there is ample evidence that providing parents and caregivers with effective support at the population level acts as an accelerator for preventing neglect and abuse and their costly and lifelong impacts on mental and physical health. Parents who are appropriately supported also show improved mental health, fostering healthy parent-child relationships and better child outcomes.

Playful parenting programmes for all

We know that evidence-based parenting programmes and interventions have been shown to be a scalable and cost-effective way to support parents and caregivers and prevent abuse, neglect, and adversity in childhood. We also know that playful and positive parenting can buffer the effects of community violence and other negative influences, helping to break generational cycles of violence and improve children’s life chances.

That is why the Global Parenting Initiative (GPI) is working closely with Parenting for Lifelong Health (PLH) and partners across the world to research, develop and implement innovative, culturally-adaptable human-digital-hybrid playful parenting programmes, especially designed for low-cost, large-scale delivery. Our core studies are adapting and evaluating the tried-and-tested PLH in-person programmes - a suite of open-access, non-commercialised parenting programmes to prevent child abuse and promote child learning and development in low-resource settings around the world - for digital and human-hybrid delivery.

These evidence-based programmes will equip parents and caregivers with a valuable toolbox of positive parenting skills, stress management techniques and support, helping to prevent violence against children and provide parents with the knowledge to help their children realise their full potential. We aim to provide 25.7 million families in the Global South with free, evidence-based playful, positive parenting support, reaching 250 million children by 2030.

Innovative solutions to large-scale delivery

While the long-lasting benefits of parenting programmes for parents and children have long been known, access to these interventions is limited for most of the world’s parents. But the pivot to digital caused by the Covid-19 pandemic has opened up new possibilities for extending the reach and accessibility of parenting resources to many more families worldwide. 

The GPI has taken this opportunity to conduct ground-breaking research with families across the Global South - including in Africa, Asia, and Latin America - to rapidly adapt, develop and scale up in-person, remote, digital, hybrid, and multimedia parenting programmes, with the goal of making these programmes freely available to parents globally.

This initiative involves developing the open-source digital infrastructure to deliver the GPI’s programmatic offerings, which include ParentApp - app-based parenting support for parents of teens and young children, ParentText - a chatbot for parents of children from 0-17, and ParentChat - live online parenting support groups delivered via platforms, such as WhatsApp. These hybrid platforms are accessible across various digital services (including offline, when there is no internet access), adaptable to different cultures and contexts, and scalable to meet population-level demand.

Findings from a pilot of ParentApp in Tanzania and a multi-country (Malaysia, Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia, the Philippines, and South Africa) pilot of ParentChat show promising results, with reductions in violence against children, parenting stress and depression, and child behaviour problems, and increased positive parenting, amongst other encouraging outcomes.

Supporting every parent, everywhere

But developing these programmes alone won’t be enough to make the difference the GPI and our partners want to see. Parenting support at this scale will require buy-in from across the public and private sectors, stakeholders, and families themselves. Moreover, it will require policy change at a national level, based on evidence, to support the sustained institutionalisation of parenting programmes globally. The GPI aims to address this - working alongside interagency partners such as UNICEF, the WHO, and the Global Initiative to Support Parents (GISP), we are using evidence to advocate for parenting support to be embedded into national governments and NGO service delivery systems. 

Of course, delivering high-quality, culturally-appropriate parenting programmes at this scale will require support. While there is currently limited capacity to develop and evaluate parenting interventions in the Global South, the GPI, with the majority of our academic partners being based there, is well-placed to strengthen the capacity of researchers and institutions to support scale-up in the region. Sustainability of delivery is another core concern for us. We are thus working closely with PLH, now a registered charity, to ensure continued technical, advisory, and monitoring and evaluation support long after the GPI has finished our work.

Working together towards a brighter future

The GPI is proud to work alongside the GISP, an interagency organisation consisting of UNICEF, the WHO, PLH, the Early Childhood Development Action Network, and the Global Partnership to End Violence Against Children, to promote universal parenting support for all families that want or need it. Together, we are working on the ground to support parents and across sectors to advocate for long-term solutions ensuring that children have the best chance at a healthy, happy and hopeful life.

Read more about our work and our studies.

Read about the GISP.