Helping Parents to Parent

This literature review was commissioned by the Social Mobility Commission to explore the extent to which public policy levers can influence what parents do and what those policy levers might be. While there is some good evidence on targeted programmes for parents or for children with specific or identified needs, this review brings together the evidence on the extent to which and how public policy approaches could help a wider group of parents to parent. Under this category of what parents do, we consider their direct parenting behaviours and the factors which influence parenting. We then examine the evidence on international universal or large scale interventions that aim to address what parents do in the earliest years of their child’s life and consider which, if any, of these have the capacity to influence parenting and improve outcomes for childre