There’s plenty of research measuring the impact that adults have on the emotional development of children in their care. A recent analysis of the UK Millenium Cohort study by researchers at Cambridge University showed that warmer and closer parent-child relationships predicted better child social skills and fewer mental health symptoms in adolescents (Katsantonis et al, 2023).
Our experiences of childhood
Many of us can point to the influences that our parents or carers had on our childhood, some difficult and hopefully some positive. In one of our recent webinars, we asked attendees to reflect on the adults who influenced them as children, and we heard about the roles that parents, teachers, grandparents, aunts and uncles, and family friends took in nurturing our attendees’ younger selves.
Many of our attendees remembered those adults demonstrating kindness, understanding, play, and even how to be strict but fair. Seeing the adults around us demonstrating these qualities when we are children shapes how we value those qualities as adults and helps us to develop the skills to do the same for the children in our lives (Moreno et al, 2009). Not all adults develop these skills. This may be because they didn’t experience them as children, or for many other possible reasons.
The Nurturing Programme
These skills are the building blocks of our Nurturing Programme for parents; a 10-week experiential programme that supports parents and carers to understand and respond to their own feelings, and to model those skills for the children in their care. The Nurturing Programme was developed to support those adults, especially as they become parents, to develop those skills and pass them on to their children.
The programme draws on decades of academic research evidence and solidifies in programme form what many of us have experienced. Over the last few years, we have worked with local authorities across the UK to collect data from thousands of parents and families, many of whom are in complicated and difficult situations. At the start of The Nurturing Programme, half of parents completing a WEMWBS (Warwick and Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale) questionnaire report low mental wellbeing, and over half report low or very low prosocial skills for their children.
Using these data, independently collected by local authorities from real families across the UK, we can (and have!) measured the significant improvements in adults’ knowledge, confidence, and mental wellbeing.
Adult skills build child outcomes
Parents also report improving social skills and improving inward (e.g. anxiety) and outward (e.g. acting out) behaviours for their children.
Interestingly, we can see how the improving skills that parents report correlates with improving adult and child outcomes. We can measure how values like kindness, understanding, fair and consistent discipline and play, translate into improving outcomes for adults and children.
When adults can play and enjoy time with children then the adult’s mental wellbeing improves. Similarly, when parents have empathy for the feelings that drive children’s behaviour, the parents’ mental wellbeing improves.
Children’s social skills improve as the adults around them are more confident in understanding the emotions their child is feeling, and when they know more about what to expect as their child moves through developmental stages. When parents can set and enforce boundaries without feeling guilty, and when they feel in control of themselves and their family life, children’s difficult externalising behaviours improve.
Building on the data
Knowing more about these active ingredients of The Nurturing Programme helps us to prove how our programmes work. We hope that continuing to work closely with practitioners delivering our programmes will help us to:
- Measure why and for which parents our programmes work well, and for which parents we need to modify programme content or delivery
- Make the process of measuring outcomes useful and reflective (rather than arduous and deficit-focused)
- Learn more about the role of emotional health in improving long term socio–emotional outcomes and life chances
References
Katsantonis, I. G., & McLellan, R. (2023). The role of parent–child interactions in the association between mental health and prosocial behavior: Evidence from early childhood to late adolescence. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 48(1), 1–12.
Moreno, A. L., & Howes, C. (2009). Caregiver involvement in infant peer interactions: Scaffolding in a social context. Infant Behavior and Development, 32(3), 305–315.
Data & methods
Questionnaires are completed by parents attending a 10-Week Nurturing Programme run by a local authority in England and Wales. Scores are measured before the start of the programme, and again at the end. Questionnaires used are:
- Tool to Measure Parenting Self-Efficacy (TOPSE, n=369, parents were confident when they rated themselves as 7/10 or higher)
- Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale (WEMWBS, n= 1207, scores ≤42 are “low”, or shown as fraction answering often/all the time for each question)
- Parent-reported child Skills and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ, n= 1781, recommended categorisations for total scores, or fraction answering ‘certainly true’ for each question)
Written by Robin Lerner. Last updated: July 30, 2025