Life skills

This activity is designed to support the parent by developing their capacity and skills relating to other aspects of their life, through didactic teaching and coaching on topics that are not directly related to parenting.

How can it be implemented?

This activity is implemented through curriculum material on capacity and skills unrelated to parenting behaviours, child relationship and child development. These include:

• Promoting positive mental health
• Goal setting
• Budgeting
• Collaborative problem solving to devise solutions to family challenges
• Mentoring and advice to assist client families to mobilise their strengths and resources

Who is the target group?

This flexible activity has been implemented with several different target groups. Key characteristics include:

• Aboriginal mothers in Central Australia
• Families at risk using indicators such as education level, single parenthood, employment, history of abuse or neglect, potential for violence, and a history of mental illness, criminality, and drug abuse
• African American mothers who have not accessed adequate prenatal care

What programs conduct this activity?

Nurse-Family Partnership: The nurses promote maternal life-course development (such as family planning, educational achievement, and participation in the work force).

Australian Nurse-Family Partnership Program: The nurses and Aboriginal community workers work with pregnant women to identify strengths and opportunities, develop strategies to achieve goals and build the mothers’ capacity to identify solutions to problems.

Early Start: A critical element of this model is the provision of support, mentoring, and advice to assist client families to mobilise their strengths and resources in order to improve parent physical and mental health; family economic and material wellbeing; and stable and positive intimate partnerships.

Pride in Parenting: One focus of the curriculum is to promote life skills. Topics for home visits include women’s health needs, healthy relationships, family planning, budgeting, developing social support, involvement of fathers, drug use and smoking.

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