Prevent - Stockholm ABC children focus

The aim of ABC is to promote children´s positive development by a positive relationship between parents and children. ABC consists of four meetings with an optional of a fifth follow-up meeting. The first meeting is titled show your love, the second take part, the third show the way and the fourth choose your battles.

The starting point of the program was a combination of knowledge gained from scientific research, parent´s needs and the requests from the municipalities/city districts, all with the intention to incorporate the child’s perspective in every part. The design of the program is informed by results since 4000 interviews were conducted with parents. These were aimed at get a picture of what parents would like to discuss about the parental role and how they would like to discuss the topics.

In 2010, 56% of the people living in Spånga-Tensta had a migrant background. There are high rates of unemployment in Tensta. Many children have no role models active in the labour market. Many of the parents are confident in their parent role when the children are very young but they feel worried about how they will cope as their children get older,  and will need to fit in with the preschool, the school culture and the wider society.

Spånga-Tensta is a segregated city district. In Spånga most inhabitants are native swedes living in villas or detatched houses. Many of them are born and raised in the neighbourhood since generations. In Tensta on the other hand, many families are newely arrived imigrants from all over the world. Some of them stay in Tensta, other moves on to other neigbourhoods as they find jobs and feel more integrated in the swedish society. Compared to Spånga, childgroups in preschools and schools in Tensta are not the same for more than one year, due to families moving in and out in the neigbourhood.

The parent councelors at the The Family center in Spånga-Tensta saw the need of a short program for all parents where they could discuss their parenthood. The aim was to form groups where all kinds of parents could meet and discuss common challenges at home. The group itself could be the meetingpoint where parents from different backgrounds could get to know each other and find out that there are more similarities than differences between. Another aim was to invite parents to ABC at places where parents felt at ease and were used to visit.

Prior to implementing the ABC-program , the major challenge was convincing the local district authority managers to invest in this type of initiative.
The aim was to integrate general parent support as a task and a service for parents in the ordinary and every day work, everywhere where parents visit to show the benefits for the preschool, school, social service itself when they make an effort to invite parents in general.

The background of ABC was an initiative from the government to the Swedish National Institute of Public Health to develop the general parent support in Sweden. The Spånga-Tensta City district became a part of this initiative as we wanted to create a focused parent support program and we set out to create ABC – “All children in focus” together with other municipalities and researchers.

The target group is „All parents with children between 3-12 years“.

How does it work?
ABC is now offered by ABC group leaders with different professional background in preschools, schools, the family center and other places, which are natural meeting points for parents. The Swedish for immigrants (SFI) language service also offers the program. There are 25 group leaders in Spånga-Tensta, they are preschool teachers, teachers, native language teachers, pupils social welfare staff, social workers and some other professions. There are networking, training and mentoring activities to support them.
In 2012 the political leadership in Stockholm decided that all parents in Stockholm will be offered the opportunity to participate in an ABC-group. A letter was sent out to all parents – and 5000 parents answered that they wanted to join a group
All city districts in Stockholm are now offering ABC. During 2012 and 2013 it is free of charge to attend courses to become an ABC group leader.

Challenges along the way?

• To get the preschools and the schools to assign and train group leaders and make it possible for them to have groups.
• To recruite parents to the groups and find good ways to reach all parents in the city district.
• To integrate the parent support in our ordinary activities after the project period 2010-2011 have a structured network for co-operation around children and youth on several organizational  levels. The steeringcommittie in the network is also the head for strategy and support for the general parents support, ABC. As the top management level had good knowledge about the program, they were highly motivated to spread information about ABC, train network parties and invite to parents groups. After a while also part of the good practice between organisations and positive results from inviting to parent groups. 

Members of different management teams were also given an oppurtunity to try parts of the speaking and after that it was much easier to get more organisations involved.

Why is it considered  to be a ”good practice”?
 Every parent is the most important person in every childs life. The basis is that all parents want the best for their child but some parents have a lack of confidence, to take a leading part of raising their child. We want to make them more confident, let them find and build strong and loving bonds between themselves and the child from an early stage to last through out the years. We want them to discover that it is not too complicated and if they feel they are not alone in that situation and are able to get help from others.  ABC is a structured way of talking about difficult matters as a parent. The theme show your love, take part, show the way and choose your battles are the same irrespective of the child age and are basic for raising and supporting children to be responsible grown-ups.
According to ABCgroup leaders who hold the ABC-programme the meetings give oppurtunities to point out how important the parents are for the children´s developement. Discussions about the importance of being involved in the every day life of the children, how to find positive ways to have a dialogue about school and how to prevent conflicts strengthen parents abilities to support the children in school.
As ABC is directed to all parents and is easy to invite to, the meetings work as door openers to  parent´s who need more help.
We believe that it is easy for other cities or countries to understand the concept and use it for the same purpose in their own districts.

Evaluation
Participation satisfaction and fee-back are collected in on-going follow-ups and adjustments of the programme content have been done. Generally the participants are very satisfied. The Karolinska Institutet (Medical university in Stockholm) is conducting a randomised controlled trial of ABC. The extensive evaluation of ABC (conducted by Karolinska Institutet) will be published in 2014 but hopefully there would be some results at an earlier stage.