What is Supported Parenting? 'Supported parenting is a philosophy, not a curriculum.' (Polly Snodgrass)
Supported parenting is a principled approach to helping families headed by a parent or parents with learning difficulties.
It is about developing new forms of support that are responsive to parents' perceptions of their own needs.
The supported parenting model involves working long term to build on a family's strengths in order to promote competence and sustain independence.
The idea of supported parenting is grounded on a core of practice principles that have emerged from the experience of working with mothers and fathers who have learning difficulties and their children. Foremost among these core principles are the following:
- Support must be based on respect for the parents and for the emotional bond between the parents and their children.
- Parents should be regarded as a resource, not as a problem.
- Parents have needs as people too.
- Support should be directed to the family as a unit rather than to individual members.
- Parents should be enabled to feel in control and to experience being competent.
- Intervention should focus on building a family's strengths rather than on attending to its weaknesses.
- Families are best supported in the context of their own extended families, neighbourhoods and communities.
- Parents must be engaged as active partners in service planning and involved as equals in choices and decisions affecting their family.
 Tim Booth and Wendy Booth, 'Supported parenting for people with learning difficulties: lessons from Wisconsin', Representing Children, 9(2), 1996, 99-107.
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