Practitioners working with specifically targeted groups identified parent-training as an important resource. As well as being ‘a mainstream programme for all parents’, as one commented (FG RN Participant 3), CSP was described as a good way of engaging with or providing services to specific or hard-to-reach groups. Target groups highlighted in interviews included parents from the Travelling community, foster carers, mothers with babies, parents affected by addiction, physical/sexual abuse survivors, and parents of young people at risk of being involved in crime or antisocial activity. For example:
As a public health nurse you meet a lot of mothers and babies, and so they present sometimes with the typical problems, you know, tantrums and difficulties with discipline and learning to say no, so they’re perfectly suited for Common Sense Parenting. So it’s just great to be able to offer them a course that I know they’re going to benefit from. (Practitioner FG CB Participant 7)
We would have a lot of Traveller kids coming to the project, and I suppose we would know what was going on locally for travellers and issues with them as a parent, so we feel this [CSP] is a good angle. (Practitioner 2)
We identified that wouldn’t it make sense to train all foster parents up together in Common Sense Parenting than us going out supporting foster parents, do you know what I mean? Let’s identify what they feel they need: Is it work on attachment? Is it work on boundaries? The Common Sense Parenting is one strand of the training that’s being offered to foster parents. (Practitioner 1)
For us [Rape Crisis Network] it was the unknown aspect of educating people around the impact of being abused in childhood, how that turns up when you become a parent, because again we would reckon there were so many people; it would be the experience of becoming a parent that might trigger the kind of unresolved traumas from their own childhood that they experience. (CSP Management FG CB Participant 2)
Representatives from several participating organisations indicated that CSP was an opportunity for service providers to address the needs of children and families in a more holistic and integrated manner. CSP management representatives, for example, identified the provision of parent-training programmes as important in efforts to divert children and adolescents from criminal or antisocial activity. As referred to above, and as many interviewees highlighted, CSP is considered a helpful addition in achieving their organisations’ goals in this regard.
Projects have changed in a way that we’re not now looking at just what young people, the crimes they’ve committed. We’re actually looking at the behaviours that are leading them to commit crime, and one of our areas that we look at now is family circumstances and parenting. So we’re looking to Common Sense Parenting to address issues in the home around boundary setting, consistent parenting between mum and dad; are they both setting the same boundaries and giving out the same amount of praise and consequences. (CSP Management FG CB Participant 5)
Feedback from agencies is that the families they are involved with is that if that’s [parenting] not working or if there’s a need in the long-term upbringing of a young person, they could end up being involved in criminal and antisocial behaviour. So that’s why we think Common Sense Parenting. If we see that as a need that parents can then avail of those programmes, and maybe look at different issues that they’re having in the home, that they might be addressed. (CSP Management FG CB Participant 6)
There was a real gap in the services that we were providing; we weren’t really meeting the needs of the young people who were attending. Even if it was for individual work or group work, we weren’t really meeting the needs of the families, we hadn’t been delivering family support work models really in the project, and for us Common Sense Parenting just seemed like the right thing at the right time. (CSP Management 3)
Service providers suggested further development of CSP’s ‘community focus’ in order to extend coverage and to meet the varied needs of potential service users in both counties. Several argued that the programme needs to build upon the flexibility which several pointed out has characterised its implementation. Management representatives identified targeting schools, in particular, as a successful CSP development strategy that needs to be expanded. Several spoke of the increased capacity to access a broad spectrum of parents/guardians through schools. In addition, practitioners’ capacity to engage (in terms of referral) with other services and professionals (school principals and teachers, Home School Community Liaison Coordinators and others) on delivering parenting supports would be expanded, in their view:
If you’re able to target it at in the sense ready-made populations, for example in schools where there’s a ready-made population, but also it takes the stigma, as it were, out of going for specialist parenting intervention. (CSP Management FG CB Participant 3)
The following year then we actually looked specifically at targeting parents that the home school liaison personnel was working with, and that worked a lot better. So then I suppose you had a group of people who needed it [CSP] for whatever reason, and that seemed to work, but there was parents who didn’t get it and we really wanted to get them. (CSP Management FG CB Participant 1)
We do a lot of CSPs in schools and that, and you might get to meet with the principal or the coordinator of transition year or whoever’s organising the venue and you make links. They might not know what service you deliver, and they might say, ‘Do you know what now, I have a few kids for you’, and then you could end up getting a few referrals. (Practitioner FG CB Participant 1)
A service provider recommended expanding co-facilitation of CSP among service providers as a means of accessing service users. In addition to aligning with ongoing CSP training policy (see section 2.4.1), local partnerships with ‘on-the-ground community workers or a resource teacher or a pastoral care person in a school’ would, in his view, provide CSP with greater visibility in communities (Independent Service Provider 2). He felt local involvement in organising and delivering CSP would result in greater numbers of parents/guardians receiving CSP.
Moreover, practitioner buy-in was acknowledged as important in CSP’s development to date in both counties. Several management representatives felt that practitioner confidence in the programme had strengthened the multi-agency aspect of CSP and had, as one commented, generated ‘a sense of ownership of the model’ among facilitators (CSP Management 2). Also, CSP’s compatibility with other Mol an Óige family support interventions (as previously discussed) was identified by practitioners as aiding the promotion of the programme. However, while interagency collaboration was important in implementing CSP within both counties, there was little research evidence of inter-county collaboration on CSP.
We try and reach all four corners of the county, and it’s a good buy-in, and I think again practitioners buy into the programme because they get the sense of the benefits from it from the people who they give it to. (CSP Management 2)
It’s seen as part of our work, like we have to run at least two CSPs per year if possible and try and target a lot of the parents of the kids that need it, the new referrals into the [Mol an Óige] project of that particular year. So it does support our work very well and we’re given the time and space to do it. (Practitioner 2)
The fact that there are case workers on the ground implementing the behavioural … the Mol an Óige model, they’re in a position to sell, as it were, the Common Sense Parenting programme. (Independent Service Provider 2)