Safe parents

About the project

Immigrant parents living in deprived areas often worry about their children's safety and future, at the same time as they have difficulties facilitating the best development potential for their children. Social services can help parents and their children to attain more promising developmental outcomes through focus on early preventive parenting support efforts, but these efforts need to be culturally tailored for the best possible results.

For this reason, social services in the municipality of Örebro developed a culturally sensitive parenting support program aimed at immigrant parents living in deprived areas, who are worried that their children (age 12-18) engage in or will be exposed to harmful environments. The Self-Assured Parenting Program (SAP) offers support to these parents by building on protective factors and strengthening parents in their parenting through focus on parenting competence and parent-child communication.

The purpose of SAP is to increase parents’ self-confidence and communication between parents and their teenagers as well as to reduce parents' worries through activities that have a clear focus on empowerment and knowledge of child development. This multi-design project aims to test the implementation and effect of TF in Örebro and other Swedish municipalities with similar problems through observation, interviews with parents and group leaders/managers as well as longitudinal effect measurements of parenting competence, parent-child communication and worries about their children's psychosocial development.