Professionals
Working with young parents and their children?
Join our mission to change hearts, minds, policy, and practice so that society has a better understanding of young parent families’ experiences and treats them with compassion.
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For those of us working in services that are used by young parent families, we know the complexities these young parents face and some of the system challenges that make accessing services difficult.
But did you know that early parenthood is both a marker and amplifier of adversity?
Young parents and their children face concentrated risks: mental health problems, poverty, abuse, poorer child health and safeguarding intervention. Early parenthood + poverty + mental health issues + abuse history creates a higher risk of intergenerational trauma and repeated cycles of disadvantage.
WILD wants to break the cycle to create a fair start for every young parent and their babies. To achieve this, we are working towards four strategic goals; explore, practice, share and change; all of which centres on lived experience and the infant-parent voice.
Explore:
We want services affecting young parents to be built on a continuous, two-way flow between research and practice.
Our practice at WILD is grounded in the best available research and evidence. We continually draw on studies from child development, family support, and mental health to shape what we do and the insights and experiences from our work with families informs new research.
Practice:
We empower young parents to create happy, healthy lives for their family through our flagship work in Cornwall.
Our family and children teams support young parent families across Cornwall to:
Support babies’ growth and development.
Create safe, healthy lives for themselves and their babies.
Build whole-family wellbeing.
Develop secure infant–parent attachment.
Over 700 parents and 500 babies and children make up our young parent community in Cornwall, annually. In addition to guiding our work, they have created a social movement which has grown to be a powerful, collective voice, sharing experiences so that more people empathise with them to create local and national change. WILD's young parent community has, to date, guided work in cervical health, social care proceedings, perinatal communications, TGNC young parent perinatal support, and several consultations on food poverty, young parenthood and young people and children’s rights.
Share:
We want society to have a better understanding of young parent family experiences and to treat them with compassion.
Change:
We want more young parent families to have access to targeted, quality services and are collaborating with young parents to tell their stories and campaign for a better future for them and their babies.
We have used our size and experience to move from being a local charity to taking a leading role in wider national change for babies and their young parents. Our flagship work in Cornwall puts into practice our bigger plans to create intergenerational change for babies of young parents across the UK. Our national network of over 80 health & social care professionals, researchers and academics is working together to improve the experiences of young parents and to change the narrative around young parenthood.
We are privileged to be the largest young parent charity in the UK and invite you to join our mission.