The twelve year research project, by Jo Hermanns and others at the Universities of Amsterdam and Uttrecht*, also reveals that children are still benefiting up to three years after their Home-Start volunteer has stopped visiting.
Home-Start is a family support charity set up in Leicester in 1973. There are now more than 300 local Home-Starts across the UK helping more than 69,000 children. The charity’s volunteer support format has been exported to more than 22 countries around the world, including The Netherlands. Volunteer parents are trained, then matched with other parents struggling to cope. They visit every week for a couple of hours to provide practical and emotional support tailored to that family’s needs.
Dr Elizabeth Young, director of policy and research at Home-Start UK says, “This research gives robust academic credence to what we and many thousands of parents have intuitively known for the last 40 years – that the support of a volunteer parent while you are struggling to bring up a young family is good for the you and good for your children. It gives them a better start in life.”
Researchers compared three groups of parents. In the first, each family had Home-Start support. In the two control groups there was no volunteer support. One of these control groups was a randomly selected community sample of parents and the other a group of parents with “elevated parenting stress and need for support”.
The study showed parents in the Home-Start group had more positive changes in parental wellbeing, competence and behaviour: they parented more consistently and there was less rejection of their children. At the three year follow up, the Home-Start group showed more improvements than the control groups: more responsive parenting, and children showing less temper and anger issues and less anxiety (“child externalizing and internalising behaviour problems”).
“It has always been extraordinarily difficult for us - and many other organisations that work to improve people’s lives in our complex world - to prove links between volunteers’ work and the changes in families’ lives. Often we have had nothing more to go on than the passionate recommendation of the parents we have supported,” said Dr Young.
“We will now be linking this research with Home-Start’s own comprehensive monitoring and evaluation system (known as MESH) which tracks changes in families’ lives and compares them to events affecting them and the input of Home-Start volunteers. And in future we will be linking it to other, ongoing research looking at simple and clear ways to measure the improvements experienced by families.”
“Home-Start was particularly interested that this latest research backed up earlier studies ** showing that early interventions can have long lasting effects,” continued Dr Young. “The findings also seem to contradict views that ‘early years support should be focused, highly structured and delivered by professionals’ (Olds et al, 2009). These latest findings show that less structured and more need-oriented approaches [such as volunteer support] seem to be able to bring about change too.”
The charity will now be using the findings, which describe Home-Start as ‘attractive to professionals and policymakers because of its low-costs and easy accessibility’ to attract funding to help it continue and extend its service across the UK. Elizabeth Young said, “In these straightened financial times, it is crucial to show there is a cost-effective, local and efficacious solution to the problems being faced by families in communities across the country.”