Brighter Futures is an Australian voluntary program that provides targeted support tailored to meet the needs of vulnerable families with children aged under nine years or who are expecting a child. Brighter Futures provides families with the necessary services and resources to help prevent an escalation of emerging child protection issues. It aims to strengthen parenting and other skills to promote the necessary conditions for healthy child development and well being. This report provides a baseline of activity in the Program up to September 2007.
Key points:
- The Brighter Futures children are typically under the age of six with a strong representation in the age group of two to four years. More than a third of the children had a medical condition and half of the children had a development delay.
- Nearly half of the children were identified to require intervention for behavior problems. Most of the children also had socio-emotional problems.
- Warmth, hostile parenting and consistency were three dimensions of parenting that had been identified in previous research as having an important impact on children’s subsequent health and development. Parental warmth was identified to significantly correlate with children’s behavior score. On average, the Brighter Futures parents scored slightly higher on the hostile parenting measure than the Australian population as a whole.
- On average, the primary carers assessed themselves as a ‘better than average parent’. However 13 per cent of participants stated that they had some trouble or were not very good at being a parent, compared to less than two per cent of the overall Australian population.
- More than half of the primary carers stated that they sometimes felt that they needed support but could not get it from anyone and 37 % stated that they often or very often felt that way.
- Primary carers demonstrated high levels of satisfaction with the services and the amount of service they received from the Brighter Futures program.
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