Frameworks and Policies on
Parent and Caregiver Support
The evidence around parent and caregiver support has been developed into multiple frameworks that translate evidence into actionable recommendations and “how to” guidance for policy makers, program implementers, and other stakeholders across governments and civil society. The examples shown here include multi-agency technical packages that bundle parenting interventions with other strategies and dedicated evidence-based parenting resources.
This page brings together guidelines, resources, and frameworks from across different sectors and outcomes and across the life course in order to support implementation of universal parent and caregiver support.
EARLY CHILDHOOD
Author(s): UNICEF, The World Bank, WHO, ECDAN, The Partnership for Maternal, Newborn, & Child Health, Every Woman Every Child
Languages: Arabic, English, French, Spanish
Investing in early childhood development is good for everyone – governments, businesses, communities, parents and caregivers, and most of all, babies and young children. It is also the right thing to do, helping every child realize the right to survive and thrive. The Nurturing Care Framework draws on state-of-the-art evidence on how early childhood development unfolds to set out the most effective policies and services that will help parents and caregivers provide nurturing care for infants and young children. It is designed to serve as a roadmap for action, helping mobilize a coalition of parents and caregivers, national governments, civil society groups, academics, the United Nations, the private sector, educational institutions and service providers to ensure that every infant and young child gets the best start in life.
Associated resources:
Author(s): WHO
Languages: English
Enabling young children to achieve their full developmental potential is a human right and an essential requisite for sustainable development. This guideline provides direction for strengthening policies and programmes to better address early childhood development. It contains four recommendations aimed at caregivers, health professionals and other workers who can assist them, as well as policy-makers and other stakeholders. The recommendations relate to providing responsive care and activities for early learning and integrating psychosocial interventions to support maternal mental health into early childhood health and development services.
Associated resources:
- World Health Organization Recommendations on Caregiving Interventions to Support Early Child Development in the First Three Years of Life: Report of the Systematic Review of Evidence
- Parenting Interventions to Promote Early Child Development in the First Three Years of Life: A Global Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis
- Guidance for the Health Sector to Partner with Parents and Families for Early Childhood Development
Adolescence
Author(s): WHO, UNAIDS, UNESCO, UNICEF, UN Women, UNFPA, The World Bank
Languages: English, French, Portuguese, Spanish
Adolescents are not simply old children or young adults. This deceptively simple observation lies at the heart of Global Accelerated Action for the Health of Adolescents (AA-HA!): guidance to support country implementation, which reflects the coming of age of adolescent health within global public health. For years, the unique health issues associated with adolescence have been little understood or, in some cases, ignored. But that has now changed. Adolescent health and development was made an integral part of the Global Strategy for Women’s, Children’s and Adolescents’ Health (2016–2030) (the Global Strategy) because, in the words of the United Nations Secretary-General, “[adolescents are] central to everything we want to achieve, and to the overall success of the 2030 Agenda”.
Associated resources:
Author(s): WHO, UNICEF
Languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish
This publication, produced by the World Health Organization and UNICEF, has been developed to support the implementation of the WHO Guidelines on mental health promotive and preventive interventions for adolescents, released in 2020. The Toolkit includes a core set of evidence-informed strategies to promote and protect adolescent mental health. These strategies focus on: the implementation and enforcement of laws and policies; environments to promote and protect adolescent mental health; the provision of support to parents and other caregivers; and psychosocial interventions for adolescents, including for groups exposed to vulnerabilities. Tools to guide implementation and examples of programmes already introduced in countries across regions are included.
Author(s): UNICEF
Languages: English
The resource aims to guide efforts to strengthen evidence-based programming for parenting of adolescents. Parents play an essential role in influencing how adolescents interact with the complex factors that shape their development. As children mature into adolescence, the parenting relationship evolves, and parents require new developmentally-appropriate skills and strategies to meet their children’s needs. Building on parents’ existing strengths and equipping them to provide support to their adolescent children through parenting programming has the potential to have a profound positive influence on adolescent development, consolidating and magnifying benefits from earlier investments.
Across the Lifecourse (0-19)
Author(s): WHO, CDC, The Global Partnership to End Violence Against Children, PAHO, PEPFAR, Together for Girls, UNICEF, UNODC, USAID, The World Bank
Languages: Arabic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Bulgarian, Chinese, English, Georgian, Khmer, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian Turkish, Ukrainian
INSPIRE: Seven strategies for ending violence against children is an evidence-based technical package to support countries in their efforts to prevent and respond to violence against children aged 0-17 years. The package includes the core document describing what the INSPIRE strategies and interventions are; an implementation handbook that provides details on how to implement the interventions, and a set of indicators to measure the uptake of INSPIRE and its impact on levels of violence against children.
Associated resources:
Author(s): UNICEF
Languages: English
Parent and caregiver support is a key strategy to ending violence against children. According to INSPIRE, “Helping parents and caregivers to understand the importance of positive, non-violent discipline in child development and of close, effective parent-child communication reduces harsh parenting practices, creates positive parent-child interactions and helps increase bonding between parents or other caregivers and children – all factors that help prevent violence against children.” This Guidance Note has been developed to support UNICEF and their partners implement parenting interventions for violence prevention, and includes an explicit focus on addressing the gender norms that underpin violence. It brings together the current evidence and emerging experience of the importance of supporting positive parenting in the prevention of and response to all forms of violence, with a focus on low- and middle-income countries.
Author(s): UNICEF
Languages: English
This guideline provides evidence-based recommendations on parenting interventions for parents and caregivers of children aged 0–17 years that are designed to reduce child maltreatment and harsh parenting, enhance the parent–child relationship, and prevent poor mental health among parents and emotional and behavioral problems among children.
Associated resources:
