A Brief Introduction to Using an Evidence-Based Humanistic Solution Focused Approach to Working with Parents to Reduce Anti-Social Behaviour & Youth Offending

This short eBook is a brief introduction to the work carried out by the author into the use of a Humanistic Solution Focused Approach to supporting parents with the aim of reducing youth offending and anti-social behaviour. This eBook also introduces an overview of the evidence gathered by the author based on 321 parents offered support, looking at the impact this approach had on reducing youth crime. To explore and introduce this approach a case study will be used to give the reader an idea of what the usual outcome session is like, and what transpires to help the parent and family from the first telephone contact through the initial face to face contact, through the sessions that take place and finally back to the changes that occur due to the support received. This eBook is primarily aimed at those working in social work settings or within family therapy. This could include family therapists, parenting support advisors, family link workers, family outreach workers, family resource team workers, youth offending service workers that specialise in parenting support or that have an interest in supporting parents, or family intervention project workers. It can also be useful for trainee social workers that will be specialising in working with children and families or trained social workers that want to add new ideas to their toolbox of skills or even children and family centre staff or those that run parenting or family courses. At this time in the UK supporting parents to reduce and prevent youth anti-social behaviour and youth crime is a hot topic. There is an increasing need to offer parenting courses and groups and one to one support to parents of children and young people that are either already ‘young offenders’ or are ‘at risk’ of becoming young offenders. To get funding the expectation is that support offered has an evidence-base. With an evidence-base it is possible to say with some confidence what outcomes are likely to be achieved. So if a proposal for funding is submitted, for example, with the intention of reducing youth crime or anti-social behaviour, this approach described here is likely to lead to a 68% reduction in youth crime convictions over the year following parents attending support, and three years later the reduction compared to young people of parents that would have met the criteria for receiving support but didn’t is still likely to be 66% less youth crime convictions. There are things that can be done based on these findings to improve on these figures, like running a monthly support group that parents can drop in to if they have any months where things seem to be slipping and a little additional support would be helpful. This eBook consists of an introduction about the author and the work that has been undertaken into using a Humanistic Solution Focused Approach to supporting parents to reduce and prevent youth crime and anti-social behaviour and what evidence was gathered to support the use of this approach. The eBook then moves on to how parents were engaged in the support, what challenges needed to be overcome and how these challenges were managed to encouraged parental engagement, how change can be created within a brief period of time and how to know what work needs to take place, where the parent is at now and where they want to be, how to find solutions from within the clients’ life, and the outcomes gathered, both subjective ‘soft data’ outcomes and non-subjective ‘hard data’ outcomes.