Policy and Practice

• Supporting the families of young people with problematic drug use: Investigating support options (2008)

  This report investigates the support needs of families who are caring for a young person (12 and 25 years of age) who is misusing substances.

• Drug Use in the Family: Impacts and Implications for Children (2007)

  This report focuses on the impact of parental substance misuse, specifically alcohol and illicit drug use, in children aged between 2 and 12 years.

• Improving Outcomes for Children Living in Families With Parental Substance Misuse: What do we Know and What Should We Do? (2008)

  This paper provides an overview of the research literature on the outcomes of children raised in families with multiple problems including parental substance misuse.

• An Evaluation of The Parents under Pressure Programme (PuP) at Coolmine, Dublin (2018)

  The current research aimed to investigate the feasibility and effectiveness of the PuP programme being delivered in a group setting in addition to one-to-one sessions at Ashleigh House (Dublin). A combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods was employed. Twenty-three women took part in the research across three waves.

• An Evaluation of ‘Parents under Pressure’; A Parenting Programme for Mothers and Fathers who Misuse Substances: Technical Report (2018)

  This technical report provides additional detail and information on the evaluation methods, analysis and findings from the NSPCC’s evaluation of the Parents Under Pressure (PuP) programme.

• An Evaluation of ‘Parents under Pressure’: A Parenting Programme for Mothers and Fathers who Misuse Substances (2018)

  This reports on an evaluation of the Parents under Pressure programme by commissioned by the NSPCC in the UK. The research demonstrates the potential for families who are facing multiple adversities (alongside substance misuse) to make positive changes with support. Parents accessing this service had better emotional health and greater levels of mindful parenting at the end of PuP, and a third of parents were deemed to pose less of a risk to their children. Within the context of the NSPCC-commissioned RCT (Barlow et al, 2018), these findings suggest that PuP is an effective programme for improving outcomes for parents, which are likely to improve the quality of the parent–child relationship and reduce the risk of child maltreatment.