Customised support for families - early help and the needs of families with infants and toddlers

Early help, child protection, early help network, prevention

10/2016 until 06/2018

The aim of the project is to analyse, in cooperation with two model locations in Baden-Württemberg, the extent to which young families with infants and toddlers are supported and cared for in a professionally appropriate and individually tailored manner by the respective local interdisciplinary Early Help network.

Local network structures are an important prerequisite for functioning early help services. They have been increasingly established and expanded in recent years. The National Centre for Early Intervention provides scientific support for this development process. However, the question of whether good multi-professional cooperation and network structures have an impact on appropriate and customised support and care for young families has not yet been systematically investigated. However, this is a central quality feature of early help. The good and differentiated interdisciplinary network structures in Baden-Württemberg offer the best conditions for investigating this question.

In order to achieve the project objective, it is planned to accompany young families with infants and toddlers over a period of approx. 6-9 months in co-operation with two municipalities in Baden-Württemberg (model locations), to record their needs for early help and to document the services they receive. This is done with the participation of the parents and taking into account their perspective on the quality of the support they receive. At the same time, in-depth interviews will be conducted to obtain the views of those involved in early help and the local network will be analysed using a questionnaire survey of the key network stakeholders. The aim is to bring together the perspectives of young parents as well as the professional views of the early help stakeholders so that proposals for the further development of early help networks can be derived together with practitioners.