Community support

Where to start

For almost everything, the NHS is the right first move, and it costs nothing.

• Your child’s school. The pastoral lead, the head of year, or the form tutor. Free, already knows your child, and often the fastest route to a change that helps. Before or alongside anything else. A school cannot act on what it has not been told, and what you bring is often what it did not have.
• Your local authority. The council’s children’s services and SEND team. They hold statutory assessment, the Local Offer, and early help for families who need more than a school can give. When school-level support has been tried and is not enough, or when you want to know what your area actually provides. www.gov.uk/find-local-council
• Citizens Advice. Free, independent advice on the practical layer: housing, benefits, debt, employment, and your rights when a family separates. When the worry is partly a practical problem wearing an emotional coat. Solving the practical part often lowers the temperature at home more than anything else will. www.citizensadvice.org.uk

For community support

• Netmums. A long-established UK parenting community. The right signpost when the parent needs community, not a clinician. Chapters where what the parent needs is to hear from other parents going through the same thing. Particularly useful for isolation, early-years bewilderment, and the everyday textures of family life. Treat with editorial care: peer support, not professional support. Support from other parents rather than professional advice. www.netmums.com
• Home-Start UK. The UK’s family-support network of trained volunteers visiting families at home. The right pointer for the parent who needs the kind of help no friend can fully give, particularly in the early years. Quick tips or chapters touching parental isolation, single-parent burnout, illness in the family, or the parent simply finding the early years harder than expected. Local Home-Start charities operate across the UK and recruit volunteers from their communities. No central helpline; the right move is to find the local branch via the postcode lookup on home-start.org.uk. What is offered, and how long the wait is, vary by area. The local branch is the right first call. www.home-start.org.uk
• Family Lives. A free confidential helpline for any parenting concern. I send parents here when the question is about them, not about the child. When the chapter is about the experience of parenting itself, the family system, or a parent who needs to be listened to. Particularly strong for bullying and for the parent who is holding things together at the edge of their capacity. Family Lives confidential helpline 0808 800 2222 · Mon-Fri 9am-9pm; weekends 10am-3pm · Live chat Mon-Fri 10.30am-9pm; WhatsApp 07441 444125; email askus@familylives.org.uk www.familylives.org.uk
• Contact (for families with disabled children). The UK charity for families with disabled children. The warmest UK line we know for the parent in the early days after a diagnosis. Any chapter where a parent is holding a new diagnosis, navigating benefits, or contending with the wider system around a disabled child. No diagnosis required to use the helpline, which matters for families still in the assessment process. UK-wide. Contact Helpline 0808 808 3555 · Mon-Fri 9.30am-5pm (Tue opens 10.15am) contact.org.uk/help-for-families/information-advice-services/our-helpline

If you are considering private therapy

Waiting lists are long. If you can meet the cost, a registered therapist can usually be seen in weeks rather than months. Both registers below are accredited by the Professional Standards Authority, which is the thing to check before anything else.

• BACP Therapist Directory. The British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy’s public register. Search by area, by what you are bringing, and by whether the therapist works with children. www.bacp.co.uk/search/Therapists
• NCPS Therapist Directory. The National Counselling and Psychotherapy Society’s register. Every therapist listed is qualified, supervised, insured, and accountable to a code of ethics. ncps.com/find-a-counsellor
• Kensington Square Therapy. Our own practice. We work with children, young people and parents, in the room at 23 Kensington Square, online, and inside schools we partner with. www.kst.ltd

What to look for in a therapist, what a first session is like, and the questions worth asking before you commit, are set out at theparentbook.com/finding-a-therapist

Everything else

The full directory, across every subject, is at theparentbook.com/services. If a number here has changed, please tell us at hello@theparentbook.com and we will correct it.