Effective family support services

HENRY provides a range of innovative and evidence-based family support services which fully comply with all relevant NICE guidance, and are underpinned by the proven HENRY approach to behaviour change.

Our family support services are all available face-to-face or online. They can be provided in a for groups setting or on a 1-to-1 basis and include:

• Multi-week programmes: healthy pregnancy, healthy start, obesity prevention, weight management, and cooking skills

• Workshops: stand-alone subject-specific sessions on a wide range of health and parenting issues from breastfeeding to starting solids, from oral health to emotional wellbeing, fussy eating, and more

• Volunteer-led peer support services

• Health promotion

• Drop-in sessions

Call us on 01865 302973 to discuss your needs locally and how we could meet them through multi-layered family support services and practitioner training.

Our Healthy Families: Right from the Start programme has the strongest evidence base of any national early years healthy lifestyle and child obesity prevention programme in the UK and over 23,000 families across all parts of the UK have now benefited from it.

Our Healthy Families: Growing Up programme for families with children aged 5 to 12 years is also based on the proven HENRY approach and is achieving similar outcomes to our early years programme.

Building relationships based on trust and respect and doing things in partnership with families rather than to them is central to everything we do. Our strength-based and solution-focused approach helps parents give their children the best start in life by focusing on factors known to be associated with later health and wellbeing. These are:

• Breastfeeding

• Parenting skills

• Emotional wellbeing

• Eating patterns and behaviours – i.e. how we eat, not what

• Healthy eating

• Physical activity

Extensive independent evaluation and peer-reviewed research studies overwhelmingly demonstrate the sustained positive impact HENRY interventions have on whole-family lifestyle, health, and emotional well-being. These include:

• More responsive parenting and increased parenting efficacy

• Higher quality parent-child interactions

• Healthier eating for the whole family – more fresh fruit and vegetables, fewer cakes, biscuits and sweets

• Positive changes to family meals – eating home-cooked food together more often, fewer take-aways

• More sociable mealtimes, with less eating in front of the television

• Children who enjoy active play and learning

• Young children who are more able to manage their feelings and behaviour – and so start school emotionally prepared and ready to learn

See details of our growing evidence base