Parenting + Education and Support for Positive Parenting

Education and Support for Positive Parenting (Parenting+)

Project financed by: Erasmus+

Project period: September 2019 – August 2022

Reference number: 2019-1-HR01-KA204-060964

Project budget: 286.641,00 EUR

Partners: 

Roda - Roditelji u akciji (Croatia)

APERIO - Společnost pro zdravé rodičovství, z.s. (Czech Republic)

Kapcsolódó Nevelés Egyesület (Hungary)

ADRESAM - Asociación por los Derechos Reproductivos y Salud Maternoinfantil (Spain)

Rumina (Slovenia)

 

Overall objective

Parenting+ aims to increase parents’ competences by establishing a comprehensive “from expecting to growing” model of parent-support grounded on the principles of informed decision-making and positive parenting, educating and supporting parents from pregnancy through the first three years of parenting.

 

Specific objectives

1. to create innovative, evidence-based curricula on postpartum and parenting
2. to train a cohort of educators who will locally deliver high-quality, modern parental education and support in childbirth, postpartum and parenting
3. to provide parents with information and education using various media and methods of delivery with the goal of reaching dislocated and under-served areas and social groups
4. to increase the partner organizations' competencies and skills in providing adult education and implementing international projects.

 

Project description

While they were implementing the project Adult Education for Positive Pregnancy, Birth and Postpartum (3P+), project partners identified that parents need support beyond this period of early parenthood. A team from five EU countries was assembled, chosen because of the similarities among parents in these five countries:

1. Most have grown up in the Mediterranean and Central European cultures which traditionally rely on an authoritarian parenting model that includes physical and verbal punishment, passed down through generations and still largely considered acceptable and legitimate;

2. Users have become parents at a time of ever-expanding information, approaches, technology and media that encourage the myth of two mutually exclusive discipline models, authoritarian and permissive, as if these are the only two. In this sea of conflicting evidence parents are susceptible to unreliable information or become distrustful of changes that have taken place in parenting;

3. Parents say they are confused, overwhelmed and need to improve their parenting skills in a safe environment; they also need higher levels of media and digital literacy to prepare them for parenting in the digital age. 

Research has shown that parents form their biases and opinions about parenting before their child is born and for this reason it is imperative to begin working with them as soon as they are interested in parenting messages – and to reach them where they are – on mobile digital devices and in their local communities.

 

Therefore, the project will prepare two innovative new adult-education curricula for postpartum support and for supporting parents with children from 0 to 3 years old, to train 25 new educators from all the partner countries to provide postpartum and parenting support, and to create a new, innovative digital tool for supporting parents of children up to three years old.

The project will empower all participants (parents, experts, educators, partners and stakeholders) to increase their parenting skills, their knowledge about maternity care, parenting and parents’ needs, with the ultimate goal of transforming parenting practices and raising the quality of life for families and children.