News Release
All families need help sometimes, says Home-Start.
Media briefing
20 January 2010
ALL FAMILIES NEED HELP SOMETIMES, SAYS HOME-START
Home-Start reaction to launch of the government’s - ‘Support for All – the Families and Relationships Green Paper’
Offer for interviews: Kay Bews, chief executive of Home-Start UK.
Home-Start is delighted to see a key area of the green paper is a consultation on how to make it more acceptable for parents to seek help for their families [see page 134 of the report, Question one: What more can we do to help create a culture in which seeking help for relationship or parenting problems, or other family difficulties, is considered socially acceptable?].
Home-Start is an outreach service, already supporting nearly 34,000 families in their own homes every year. 25% of our families self-refer for our help.
We say:
• Parents need a wide range of services and different approaches to choose from.
• The support must be non-stigmatising. Often families find it hard to seek support from statutory agencies. Home-Start’s support from another parent, who is a volunteer, is seen as acceptable. This is why 16,000 Home-Start volunteers are accepted into families’ homes each year and allowed to help. As a society we must make all family support services as acceptable as going to the doctor.
• It is crucial that agencies work together to offer a range of joined up services. Health visitors are particularly important partners of Home-Start.
• Early intervention is essential and the most cost effective approach. It is better for families to accept help while they are fragile but before they break.
• Services must be available to all families but tailored to their individual needs. A universal, tailored support service like Home-Start’s offers support across the social, ethnic and economic spectrum. Our approach can be tailored to support an isolated, postnatally depressed mother in big house in the country as well as an inner city lone father with a child on the child protection register.
• Everyone in society has a part to play; to ensure that no family is judged for asking for help.
We can also provide interviews on the fathers elements of the families green paper.
• Phone interviews with local Home-Start staff in Kent or in Hampshire who run established and newly established father’s support groups. One is a general fathers’ support group. The other has been very recently set up at the request of the local women’s mental health hospital after it was found that 60% of the husbands of severely postnatally depressed women also suffer from depression themselves.
• Telephone interviews with Home-Start East Lindsey (based in Louth, Lincolnshire) to describe the support they provide at home for individual fathers, particularly single dads. Over the last year they have seen an increase in the number of fathers getting more engaged with the ‘family support’ provided by Home-Start – voicing their appreciation of the support at home and also attending more of the events run by the local Home-Start (such as summer trips and Christmas parties) . They have also noticed a lot more fathers at home – whether because of the recession, or because they have to support incapacitated mothers (through long term illnesses, disability, depression etc).
What Home-Start does: provides trained parent volunteers to give regular, one-to-one support to parents who are struggling with young families.
Home-Start is: is the leading family support charity in the UK. We are a network of 336 independent local Home-Starts supporting families across the UK and on British Forces bases in Germany and Cyprus. Last year we supported nearly 34,000 families (including more than 71,000 children). We have almost 16,000 volunteers who visit families in their own homes for a couple of hours every week, to support them through isolation, depression, illness, multiple births, bereavement, family breakdown, or just struggling to cope with their young families. While we support families from across all social and ethnic strata, we are increasingly working in partnership with social services to provide support for families with multiple layers of problems.
Find out more about Home-Start: www.home-start.org.uk
NOTES FOR EDITORS:
Home-Start press office contacts:
Joanne McLeish – 0116 258 7933
Annie O’Brian – 0116 258 7930
Press office mobile – 07917 392130
