Supporting child development

HENRY practitioner training and family support services can dramatically improve the quality of the home learning environment, parenting, emotional wellbeing and wider lifestyle that children are born and raised in, with quite literally life-changing impact as they grow and develop.

By supporting improvements in these areas HENRY services contribute to all aspects of child development, improving children's life chances and school readiness. Find out why the early years are a crucial time.

We offer support for all aspects of a healthy, happy childhood within a single service. Our evidence-based Healthy Families programme is holistic, covering whole-family nutrition, parenting, physical activity, emotional wellbeing, oral health, family habits and more over the course of 8 sessions.

Because of their breadth, iour programmes support all elements of the children’s centre ‘core purpose’ amd key principles of family hubs. For this reason, several commissioners choose our programmes as a key pathway for local families. Our programmes are also widely used as healthy weight programmes. 

Our family support offer also includes services specifically focused on other vital elements of child development and a healthy start – oral health, infant feeding, antenatal support, emotional wellbeing, and parenting.

The proven HENRY approach to supporting behaviour change, which practitioners learn to adopt their work through attending HENRY training, successfully integrates development of parenting efficacy with proven behaviour change methodologies.

Practitioners adopting the HENRY approach use their skills to ask the right questions (rather than provide the ‘right’ answers) to build parental readiness for change and identify what changes they will make that will work for their family. This approach is therefore effective in supporting change across a range of lifestyle goals and habits – whether it is managing bedtime routines, creating more opportunities to play with their children, or increasing frequency of family mealtimes – the HENRY approach helps parents to better support their children’s health and social development and consequently their ability to do well at school and wider life chances.

Watch our animated explainer video to find out more about our holistic approach and why it matters.