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Impact of a peer-led, community-based parenting programme delivered at a national scale: an uncontrolled cohort
Crispin Day1, Joshua Harwood2, Nadine Kendall3
1Centre for Parent and Child Support, South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, Michael Rutter Centre, De Crespigny Park, Camberwell, London, SE5 8AZ, UK. crispin.1.day@kcl.ac.uk.
Insights
This study shows that the peer-led Empowering Parents Empowering Communities (EPEC) Being a Parent (BAP) program effectively reaches disadvantaged families and improves child behavior and parenting skills when scaled up.
Area of Science:
- Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
- Public Health Interventions
- Community Psychology
Background:
- Childhood behavioral problems are a global mental health concern, disproportionately affecting socially disadvantaged communities.
- Significant treatment barriers prevent many children from accessing recommended parenting interventions.
- Evidence-based, peer-led models offer a scalable solution to improve childhood difficulties and parenting.
Purpose of the Study:
- To evaluate the population reach, attendance, acceptability, and outcomes of the Empowering Parents Empowering Communities (EPEC) Being a Parent (BAP) program during a UK scaling initiative.
- To assess the effectiveness of a peer-led parenting intervention delivered by newly established community sites.
- To compare the outcomes of the scaled-up program with benchmarked randomized controlled trial (RCT) data.
Main Methods:
- A real-world quasi-experimental study design with embedded RCT benchmarking.
- Involved 128 BAP groups and 930 parents across 15 newly established UK sites.
- Data collection focused on demographic reach, attendance, parent satisfaction, and self-reported improvements in child concerns, parenting, and parent wellbeing.
Main Results:
- Scaling program (SP) sites successfully engaged parents in areas of high social deprivation (75.3%).
- Parent participants reported significant improvements in child concerns (ES 0.6), parenting (ES 0.9), parenting goals (ES 1.2), and parent wellbeing (ES 0.6), comparable to RCT benchmarks.
- While outcomes were similar, parents in scaled sites reported lower parenting knowledge and confidence acquisition compared to the RCT benchmark.
Conclusions:
- The peer-led, community-based BAP parenting approach demonstrates successful replication potential at scale.
- The intervention shows considerable promise for addressing child and parenting difficulties, particularly in socially disadvantaged populations.
- Despite methodological limitations inherent in real-world evaluations, the findings support the scalability and effectiveness of this model.
Background:
Childhood behavioural problems are the most common mental health disorder worldwide and represent a major public health concern, particularly in socially disadvantaged communities. Treatment barriers mean that up to 70% of children do not receive recommended parenting interventions. Innovative approaches, including evidence-based peer-led models, such as Empowering Parents Empowering Communities' (EPEC) Being a Parent (BAP) programme, have the potential to reduce childhood difficulties and improve parenting if replicable and successfully delivered at scale.
Method:
This real-world quasi-experimental study, with embedded RCT benchmarking, examined the population reach, attendance, acceptability and outcomes of 128 BAP groups (n = 930 parents) delivered by 15 newly established sites participating in a UK EPEC scaling programme.
Results:
Scaling programme (SP) sites successfully reached parents living in areas of greater social deprivation (n = 476, 75.3%), experiencing significant disadvantage (45.0% left school by 16; 39.9% lived in rental accommodation; 36.9% lone parents). The only benchmarked demographic difference was ethnicity, reflecting the greater proportion of White British parents living in scaling site areas (SP 67.9%; RCT 22.4%). Benchmark comparisons showed scaling sites' parent group leaders achieved similar levels of satisfaction. Scaling site parent participants reported substantial levels of improvement in child concerns (ES 0.6), parenting (ES 0.9), parenting goals (ES 1.2) and parent wellbeing (ES 0.6) that were of similar magnitude to RCT benchmarked results. Though large, parents reported lower levels of parenting knowledge and confidence acquisition compared with the RCT benchmark.
Conclusion:
Despite common methodological limitations associated with real-world scaling evaluations, findings suggest that this peer-led, community-based, parenting approach may be capable of successful replication at scale and may have considerable potential to improve child and parenting difficulties, particularly for socially disadvantaged populations.
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