Compiling global evidence to help policymakers and practitioners better support caregivers
Photo by Rawpixel/Adobe Stock
Parenting plays a significant role in shaping the development of children around the world. Evidence suggests that the quality of parent-child relationships can affect wellbeing later in life and can have a positive impact a range of health and wellbeing outcomes for both children and caregivers. Yet, many existing parenting interventions fail to reach families who need them the most. According to a World Health Organization (WHO) survey, only about one quarter of countries worldwide have implemented parenting programmes that are accessible to all who need them. A global systematic review of parenting interventions also reported that up to 250 million children under the age of five face nutritional, health and psychosocial risks that could prevent them from achieving their full potential. While it is important to acknowledge that raising healthy, well-rounded children is a complex task inseparable from cultural and economic contexts, strengthening caregiving practices has been identified as a powerful strategy for advancing child development and wellbeing across different groups of countries.
To address this, the WHO has been bringing together academic and policy research to implement and scale evidence-based parenting interventions. In this context, parenting interventions are activities or services directed at parents or other caregivers, which aim to build parents’ knowledge, confidence and skills, and thus improve interactions in the family and the overall quality of parenting received by a child.
Prioritising interventions with robust evidence from multiple trials can ensure that any available funding is allocated to practices that work and are easy to implement instead of supporting parenting interventions with a lack of evidence base or transferability potential. Proven parenting programmes can deliver benefits on a personal and community level, through teaching skills such as positive communication or emotional regulation that help build safe and secure attachments at home. More importantly, however, they have also been associated with positive societal outcomes in the long run such as improving children’s learning and productivity and preventing violence.
We have been commissioned by the WHO to create an online repository of global parenting practices that work. This draws on RAND’s expertise in creating and maintaining a repository of best practices to improve outcomes for Children in Europe, for the European Commission's Directorate-General for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion (DG EMPL). That repository was hosted on the European Platform for Investing in Children (EPIC) between 2013 and 2021.
To create this new global repository, we are consulting experts on updating the criteria for inclusion of parenting practices to ensure they reflect the repository’s global focus and maintain a high standard of evidence and user accessibility. Simultaneously, we are developing an AI tool to be used by researchers in searching for and extracting information on parenting practices from relevant studies and evaluations. Together with expert input, this tool will help populate the repository.
The new repository is intended to help policymakers and relevant stakeholders identify relevant evidence, and to facilitate the sharing of best practices across countries and contexts.
