Location: England
Young Parents Connect was a peer support project for young parents up to 25 years of age, using a creative, whole-family approach to mental health prevention within a community setting. This included addressing key risk factors common to young parents including single mothers, Black, Asian and minority ethnic mothers and mothers at risk of long-term mental health conditions.
The programme aims to support young parents by strengthening their mental health, building social connections, and fostering confidence and resilience through peer support groups. This can lead to improved outcomes for their children.
About Young Parents Connect
Young Parents Connect sought to:
- Prevent poor mental health by increasing understanding of parental mental health, providing coping strategies and increasing help seeking behaviours
- Increase social connection and resilience through peer support with others who have shared experiences
- Build a healthy parent-child bond, reducing risk of poor outcomes for children
- Increase in confidence and aspirations
- Ensure systems provide suitable support for all parents, through workforce development and systems change.
The project works with young parents used a two-strand approach:
Weekly peer support groups
- A structured weekly peer support intervention for local young parents and their children using activities and discussion to address key issues.
- The flexible sessions are focused on “All about Me”; “Baby and Me” and “My support, my network and my community”, and are designed to provide a framework for discussions aimed at supporting the mental health and wellbeing of young parents.
Peer support pathway
- A three-stage, training-supported pathway to give parents the opportunity to get more involved in the programme through volunteering to lead on activities with the groups; working with paid facilitators to deliver sessions; and finally working as a paid facilitator to co-lead the groups themselves.
In addition, we delivered workforce training to enable people working across health and social care settings to understand the unique strengths of young parents as well as some of the barriers they face to accessing services. The training also supported the workforce to understand the role of peer support, the importance of specialist groups for young parents, and how to effectively implement the programme.
Evidence and evaluation
Starting in 2011 as Young Mums Together, a Comic Relief-funded pilot in Hackney, the programme adapted and built on the learnings gained through its time being delivered by the Mental Health Foundation. During our time running Young Parents Connect, we worked in partnership with MumsAid, The Motherhood Group, and Nottingham City Council whose Early Help team are continuing to deliver it with Family Nurse Partnership.
A two-year external evaluation of the programme by ADS published in 2024 found that:
- The mental health and wellbeing of parents increased month on month when attending a Young Parents Connect group.
- Parents have reported a boost in self-esteem, improved coping skills, improved self-reflection, improved mood and motivation, feeling hopeful about the future, and (re)gaining independence.
- Attending Young Parents Connect sessions has lasting impacts outside of the group space
Adopting Young Parents Connect
As part of the programme, we’ve developed resources to help anyone seeking to implement Young Parents Connect-style peer support groups to better support the young parents they work with.
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