Seminars and Roundtables
These seminars and roundtables are part of a partnership between WAVE Trust and Parenting UK to organise and run a series of events to promote greater understanding and use of evidence-based family and parenting interventions among voluntary and community sector organisations. They have been financed by the Department for Education and are free to attend.
Seminar: Understanding Domestic Violence
Location: London
Venue: Regent Hall, Oxford Street, London
Date: 11th December 2012
Time: 09:30-13:00
Summary
According to the charity Women’s Aid, at least 1 in 4 women experience domestic violence in their lifetime. At least 750,000 children a year witness domestic violence (Department of Health). This event will explore the impact domestic violence has and how it can affect a parent’s confidence and ability to look after their children.
Speakers
Deborah McIlveen, Head of Policy and Services for Women's Aid
Women's Aid is the national domestic violence charity that helps up to 250,000 women and children every year. We work to end violence against women and children, and support over 500 domestic and sexual violence services across the country.
David Eggins, Temper Domestic
Temper Domestic Violence runs groups at weekends for people who are violent and or aggressive and or abusivee with a partner or former partner and who want help to change. Almost uniquely in this field Temper Domestic works with both men and women.
Jane Evans, Trauma Parenting Specialist and Trainer
Works with parents on parenting after domestic violence and trains professionals who work in this area. Jane previously worked as a parenting worker for domesticviolence.org.
Update: Presentations from the seminar
- How to support parenting impacted by domestic violence (Jane Evans, Parenting UK)
- Violence: the early years (George Hosking, WAVE Trust)
Seminar: Supporting parents of teenagers
Location: Birmingham
Venue: Birmingham tbc
Date: 23 October 2012
Time: 1pm-4.30pm
Summary
As young people change and develop, explore and define their individuality, understanding and coping with their behaviour can become more challenging for parents. Whether it’s learning to communicate more effectively with teenagers, or coping with more serious anti-social behaviour, this seminar looks at different types of support and the examples of current programmes to help you in your work with parents.
Speakers
Dr John Coleman
Clinical Psychologist and founder of the Trust for the Study of Adolescence
John Coleman is a psychologist whose primary interest is adolescence. He founded the Trust for the Study of Adolescence (later renamed Young People in Focus) and was the Director of the organisation from 1989 until he retired in 2005. From 2005 to 2006 he held a post as a Policy Advisor in the Department of Health, and since October 2006 he has been a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Education at the University of Oxford.
Carole Pickburn
Carole is the author of parenting programmes ESCAPE and Parallel Lines and a co-founder of Training Together which now delivers these programmes. ESCAPE is an evidence-based parenting programme which offers a flexible framework for working with parents and young people, and it has been widely used with parents in the youth justice system and elsewhere. This programme promotes a problem solving approach in helping parents establish a positive relationship with their teenagers.
Further speakers to be confirmed
Please note this programme is subject to change
Seminar: Supporting Parents to Understand Newborn Behaviour and Relationships
Location: Leeds Venue: The Sullivan Room, Town Hall, Leeds LS1 3AD
Date: 10 July 2012
Time: 1pm-4.30pm
Summary:
This event will look at the very early behaviour of newborn babies and their first relationships with their carers. You can learn about what babies need, how they develop and how to support parents at this essential time.
Speakers:
Prof Colwyn Trevarthen
Emeritus Professor of Child Psychology and Psychobiology at the University of Edinburgh
A New Companion: Why a Newborn Is Good To Talk To, and What They Have To Say
Newborn babies don't only sleep, feed or complain; they move with the rhythms of imagination, eager for company. They want to begin the story of their life, inviting parents as friends. Soon, when looking for a chat, they are ready to share the news with a smile. They need comfort and care, but also playmates with a sense of story-telling fun. That is attachment as companionship, which should last a lifetime. Colwyn Trevarthen is Professor (Emeritus) of Child Psychology and Psychobiology at The University of Edinburgh. He studies communication in infancy, and its importance for child learning and emotional health. With musician Stephen Malloch he has developed a theory of how the rhythms and melodies of 'Communicative Musicality' in expressive movement support story-telling with infants from birth, and lead to the learning of language and other cultural skills.
Dr Joanna Hawthorne
Director, Brazelton Centre and Associate, Centre for Family Research, University of Cambridge
From birth to 3 months: abilities of babies and guiding parents to read cues and signals
The Brazelton Centre is a charity whose primary goals are to promote an understanding of infant development through fostering strong infant-parent relationships by focusing attention on the infant’s behavioural abilities, and the important role their babies play in cementing healthy infant-parent relationships. Joanna will speak about the NBAS scale which is used for infant assessment and research and as an intervention with parents, and also the NBO scale which is a relationship building tool between practioner and parents.
Hilary Kennedy
CPsychol, AFBPsS,Video Interaction Guidance Practitioner and National Supervisor
Video Interaction Guidance to work with parents and babies
Video Interaction Guidance (VIG) is a strengths-based intervention that develops attuned communication between parents and babies alongside parental reflective function.
This event was highly informative and was a great success. The seminar had high attendance and prompted some very positive feedback!
Seminar: Supporting families with drug or alcohol addiction
Date: 21 June 2012
Location: Newcastle Upon Tyne
The misuse of drugs and/or alcohol may adversely affect a parent's ability to care for the emotional, physical and developmental needs of the child in both the short and long term. Problem drinking by parents can be disruptive to children and families with up to 1.3 million children estimated to be living in a family with a problem drinking parent (Cabinet Office Strategy Unit, 2004). This event looked at supporting families coping with parental drug and alcohol addiction sharing examples of effective practice from the UK and insights into the strategies families can use to cope with living with substance misuse.
Speakers
Charlotte Blenkiron, Changing Trax, Newcastle
Newcastle’s Changing Trax service offers crisis intervention support to families impacted by substance misuse. The crisis intervention programme is based on a model, which was developed and researched over 15 years in the USA and in the past six years in Cardiff known as ‘Option 2’. The programme works intensively with families in crisis where significant parental substance misuse looks likely to contribute to a child becoming subject to a child protection plan or taken into care. Staff offer intensive support to families over a 6 to 12 week period and the service aims to create positive change in the families functioning in order to enable children to remain safely at home wherever possible.
Kate Peake, Adfam
Adfam provides several courses for families to enable them to cope with drug- and alcohol-related family conflict to both understand their conflicts and have new ideas about how they can cope better as well as helping them to set and then keep boundaries with the user in their life, and thereby reduce the impact of drug- and alcohol-related behaviour.
Gloria Nellist, Parent Development Worker, Barnardos Streetlevel Family Service
Gloria spoke about the Parenting Factor programme which was specially designed to assist parents who use drugs or alcohol to understand how their substance use can affect their children and how knowledge about substance use can help them to make positive choices and enhance their existing parenting skills.
Moving Parent and Children Together, Action on Addiction
The Moving Parents and Children Together programme (M-PACT) is an eight week family intervention programme supporting children in families where one/both of the parents or adults misuses alcohol or drugs. The programme is a whole family approach where groups of families, maximum of eight, come together once a week and work with four trained facilitators.
Seminar: Understanding and reducing family conflict
Date: 17 May 2012
Location: London
Speakers
Tackling family conflict and family violence - Ciaran Osborne, Policy and Research Manager, 4Children
4Children’s groundbreaking report, The Enemy Within, presents the full picture of conflict and violence within families. The report reveals the way in which children and parents can be both victims and perpetrators of family conflict - with the evidence suggesting that violence is more widespread within the family than was perhaps previously thought.
Parenting conflict - Krisztina Glausius, Clinical Lecturer at the Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships, Parenting Together Service clinician
Krisztina talked about family conflict in general as well as parenting conflict in particular (both within an existing parental couple or post separation) and the impact on the children. She also introduced the approach of TCCR’s Parenting Together Service as one of the ways of reducing inter-parental conflict in order to make children's lives better.
Abuse towards parents - Debbi Barnes, Ministry of Parenting
Debbi spoke about abuse towards parents which is shown by recent research to be an topic of concern for many parents. The Ministry of Parenting runs Stopping Aggression and Anti-Social Behaviour in Families one of a few courses aimed at reducing family conflict by fostering better communication, increasing insight and awareness and providing tools for dealing with anger and aggression.
Break4Change, Martyn Stoner, Youth Offending Service Brighton
Break4change(B4C) is a Brighton and Hove programme for families where young people are abusive towards their parent(s)/carer(s) i.e. hitting, name calling, making threats, stealing money or damaging possessions in the home.
Seminar: International best practice parenting approaches
Date: 21 February 2012
Location: London
This event looked at some examples of parenting support which are making a significant impact in other countries, including Kraamzorg from the Netherlands and the Community Mothers Programme in Ireland, as highlighted in WAVE’s 2010 International Review section of C4EO’s Grasping the Nettle and mentioned in Graham Allen's Review on Early Intervention.
Speakers
George Hosking, CEO WAVE Trust
Economist, accountant, psychologist and clinical criminologist, George followed a distinguished business career by founding WAVE Trust. After the WAVE report Violence and what to do about it had identified child abuse and neglect as major root causes of later violent behaviour, the charity developed a strategy to reduce child maltreatment in the UK by 70% by 2030 (‘70/30’). WAVE’s research also highlighted the crucial role of good attunement between parent and child in ensuring children grow up with empathic, pro-social personalities. The charity advises Governments and Police on violence reduction strategies.
Helen Marshall
Helen is a trained Nurse and KraamVerzorgende working in The Hague and the surrounding area. She is a British ex-pat and qualified British Paediatric Nurse, She works freelance as a Kraamverzorgende working with new mothers and babies of all nationalities in their homes providing post-natal care and advice.
Brenda Molloy
Brenda is the Director of the Community Mothers Programme in Ireland and works for the Health Services Executive in Ireland, and has published several papers on the CMP. CMP operates mainly in disadvantaged neighbourhoods and is offered to both fathers and mothers – first-timers and some second-timers – of children from birth to 24, to aid the development of parenting skills and improve parents’ confidence and self-esteem.
Seminar: Supporting parents of teenagers
24th January 2012
Location : London
As young people change and develop, explore and define their individuality, understanding and coping with their behaviour can become more challenging for parents. Whether it’s learning to communicate more effectively with teenagers, or coping with more serious anti-social behaviour, this seminar looked at different types of support and the examples of current programmes to help work with parents.
Speakers:
John Coleman, Clinical Psychologist and founder of the Trust for the Study of Adolescence
Supporting parents of teenagers: where next for professional practice?
John Coleman is a psychologist whose primary interest is adolescence. He founded the Trust for the Study of Adolescence (later renamed Young People in Focus) and was the Director of the organisation from 1989 until he retired in 2005. From 2005 to 2006 he held a post as a Policy Adviser in the Department of Health, and since October 2006 he has been a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Education at the University of Oxford.
Mary Rose Brady, Head of Parenting and Creative Therapy Services Coram
Universal support for parents of teenagers
Coram supports parents and families one-to-one or in groups, and provide access to more specialist help and support should they or their children need it. Coram Islington is a team of experienced parenting support specialists who offer information, advice and support to parents carers of young people aged 8-19.
John Rivers, Parenting Support Team Manager, West Berkshire Council
Dealing with teenage anti-social behaviour – empowering parents
John Rivers spoke about the STOP programme, originally written jointly by Essex CAMHS and YOT services and targeted at parents of teenagers at risk of offending or displaying oppositional noncompliant and difficult behaviours.
Group discussions around providing universal and targeted support, looked at whether you can provide effective support for parents of teenagers if it is just at the point of crisis.
Roundtable: Supporting families with mental health problems
13th December 2011
Location: London
This roundtable explored supporting families with mental health problems. 154,000 children in England live with a parent who has a severe and enduring mental health problem and children living in households where a parent has a severe mental health problem are more likely to live in poverty (Family Action).
Introduction by chair
Jayne Stokes, Family Action - Working with families with enduring mental health difficulties – a family’s journey
Family Action services work with those who are experiencing mental health problems and with their children; ensuring both get the support they need
Dr Samantha Callan, Chairman-in-Residence (Family, Early Years and Mental Health) Centre for Social Justice
Dr Samantha Callan talked about their latest report: Completing the Revolution: Transforming Mental Health and Tackling Poverty.
Roger Catchpole, Young Minds - Supporting a child with mental health difficulties: the parents' perspective
Young Minds is the voice of young people's mental health and wellbeing, providing advice, information and training for young people, parents and carers and professionals.
Learning outcomes:
importance of recognising mental health issues in parents/families
learn about what works well, type of extra support families may need
increase the confidence and competence of practitioners working with families with mental health needs
Seminar: Providing parenting and family support with schools
20th October 2011
Location: Manchester
This information seminar looked at examples of working with schools to provide family and parenting support.Elspeth Bromiley, Director UK, Families and Schools Together (FAST)
FAST is a multi-family group prevention designed to build protective factors for children and empower parents to be the primary prevention agents for their own children.
Julia Burns, Director of Training and Development, School Home Support
SHS works with vulnerable children within the school system.
Shirley Stephenson, Director of Programme Quality, Family Links, The Nurturing Programme
The Nurturing Programme provides simple, effective tools to help adults and children to improve emotional health and wellbeing
Q & A; Discussions
Seminar: Demonstrating impact and return on investment
22nd September 2011
Location : Bristol
Seminar taking a practical look at a range of methodologies to evidence the impact of parenting support services on families, developing and using outcomes frameworks, and some issues in measuring impact.
Speaker presentations:
Carola Bennion, Beacon CIC
The importance of being able to demonstrate impact - the perspective of commissioners and providers.
An Outcomes Framework for Parenting and Family Support - Case study.
Honor Rhodes, Director of Projects and Strategic Development, Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships
Methods of evidencing the impact of parenting support services on families.
Roundtable: Supporting prisoners families in mainstream parenting support
21st June 2011
Location: Leeds
A roundtable event to discuss providing support to the families of prisoners, including issues such as improving family relationships, helping families stay connected and supporting families after release.
Speaker presentations:
Lesley Dixon, Training and Development Officer, Action for Prisoners Families
The offender journey from a family perspective
Charlotte Weinberg and Eleanor Robertson, Safe Ground
Action for prisoners families - case study
Group discussions
Seminar: Supporting parents to understand the development of early skills in babies
8th June 2011
Location: London
An information seminar on the development of early skills in babies to support parenting practitioners work with parents.
Speaker presentations:
Dr Joanna Hawthorne, Director, Brazelton Centre and Associate, Centre for Family Research, University of Cambridge
From birth to 3 months: abilities of babies and guiding parents to read cues and signals
Jenny Cross, Chartered Educational Psychologist, Video Interaction Guidance Practitioner and Supervisor
Video Interaction Guidance (VIG) as an intervention to develop attuned communication between parents and babies
George Hosking
Summary and overview of recent research on the importance of early skill development
