Designing, Implementing, Evaluating, and Scaling Up Parenting Interventions

This handbook provides comprehensive advice for policy-makers, practitioners, and stakeholders involved in the development, implementation, and monitoring of evidence based parenting interventions. It offers a practical, step-by-step approach to selecting, designing, evaluating, implementing, monitoring, and scaling up parenting interventions in different contexts, and by referencing relevant research and offering templates and other resources to support implementation, it acts as a bridge between the evidence for parenting interventions, and practice. Why are parenting interventions important? A parenting intervention is a set of structured activities to help parents/caregivers improve parent–child interactions and the overall quality of parenting that a child receives. These interventions focus on strengthening skills and behaviours to improve the way that parents/caregivers relate to their child, as well as parental knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, and feelings. Throughout this handbook the term “parent/caregiver” is used to refer to mothers, fathers, and other caregivers or guardians who are responsible for the care of a child, including grandparents, other relatives, or non-biologically related carers. It does not refer to other adults who may be responsible for the care of a child outside the context of a home environment, such as teachers or medical personnel, although carers in institutional homes may be included. The three-phase structure of this handbook comprises six actionable steps and multiple sub-steps to guide the process of creating effective and sustainable parenting interventions.