Young Parent's Pathway

A specially trained Young Parent’s practitioner works with individual families in their own homes, or other community locations, delivering an enhanced service working to your individual strengths, supporting, and encouraging each person to reach goals and aspirations for themselves and their babies.

Home visits start during pregnancy and continue until the child turns two. Throughout the programme journey, young parents and a Young Parent Practitioner will work on different aspects of the pregnancy and early years together, including parent-child attachment, breastfeeding, immunisation, child development and school readiness.

Dependant on the individual needs, the Young Parent Practitioner will work alongside young parents, helping to improve on things such as self-confidence in themselves and their parenting capacity as well as supporting on other issues such as support with goal setting, housing, education and employment and addressing health needs such as signposting to stop smoking services, contraception and sexual health services.

By supporting families during the pregnancy and early stages of the child’s life, the Young Parent Practitioner can help to:

• deliver a programme with the young parent to meet individual needs
• Support young parents’ chance of a healthy pregnancy
• provide regular developmental reviews for each child
• improve child's development outcomes and school readiness
• support young parents to build positive relationships with their baby and other people
• support young parents to reach their aspirations and plan for their futures
• support young parents to make positive lifestyle choices to give each child the best possible start in life

The Young Parent Practitioner will visit regularly during pregnancy and then after the birth until the child is 2 years old.  You will still receive care from your midwife, and allocated health visitor.

Whilst enrolled on the pathway the Young Parent Practitioner will work alongside your allocated health visitor. Once the Young Parent Pathway stops (when your child turns 2 years old) you will still be able to contact your health visitor till your child attends school.

A Young Parent Practitioner would complete a recruitment visit at 20 weeks gestation, if you would like to receive the Young Parent Pathway after this visit the practitioner would arrange to start pregnancy visits from 22 weeks gestation.

During pregnancy, your Young Parent Practitioner would complete 5 visits and 1 joint visit with your allocated health visitor.

Once your baby is born your Young Parent Practitioner will complete a joint new birth visit with your allocated health visitor between 10-14 days after birth. Followed by 6 visits before your child is 1, your Young Parent practitioner would also complete 2 joint additional visits with your allocated health visitor before your child turns 1. These would be between 6-8 weeks and between 10-12 months.

4 visits would be completed by your Young Parent Practitioner between your child turning 1 and 2 years old.

The Family Nurse Partnership team accept notifications of pregnancy for mums that would meet the criteria for Family Nurse Partnership or the Young Parents Pathway, aged 21 years and under, who live in Suffolk and expecting their first baby.

Developmental Reviews

The NHS explains what to expect at health and development reviews.

Ages and Stages

Ages and Stages Questionnaires (ASQs) are a licensed product used by our staff across the Health and Children's Centres. They help us understand how your child is developing and are just one of the tools we may use during our contact with you.

All children develop differently.  The ASQ are something that we will use together to talk about the things your child is able to do, to think about any concerns you might have and how we can support you and your child with those.

They are split into 5 different areas;

• Communication: Your child’s language skills, both what your child understands and what he or she can say - this can be sounds, babbling or talking.
• Gross Motor: How your child uses their arms and legs for sitting, crawling, walking, running, and other activities.
• Fine Motor: How your child uses their hands and fingers - for example scribbling or picking up food.
• Problem Solving: How your child plays with toys and solves problems.
• Personal-Social: Your child’s self-help skills and how they play and interact with others.

The ASQ we use, is based on the age of your child by month, but we may decide together that this is not right for your child and decide to use a different age or an alternative assessment tool. This is nothing to worry about, we are just making sure we use the right tool for your child. 

You can visit the ASQ webpage to download fun and easy activities to help support your child's development.