The European Erasmus+ project Skills4Parents (2020-2022) aims to influence the lives of adult educators, parents, children and families through enriching their lives and gaining valuable skills, competences, and life tools. With modern technologies developing fast, many parents need more support, guidance and mentoring in meeting the everyday challenges in raising their children. Throughout this project, we are defining these motivated parents in need of support as learning parents.
With years of experience in supporting learning parents who need extra guidance, the project partners agree on recognising that parents often struggle with common issues that are present in the everyday lives of families, especially in those families already facing exclusion or with a higher risk of being socially marginalized and excluded. One of the solutions to this is the upskilling of parents, which leads to their better understanding of children’s needs and their mutual relationship. This ultimately results in better quality of life of families – of children, but also of parents themselves.
The overall goal of the Skills4Parents strategic partnership is to improve personal growth, communication and parenting skills of parents as well as professional skills of adult educators working with parents.
In order to develop a solid basis for the project outputs (a guide and an online learning platform), it was necessary to have an evidence-based understanding and a clear insight into the current situation of the participating regions (Belgium, Croatia, Cyprus, Italy, The Netherlands). Therefore, we conducted desk research as well as focus groups and interviews with 25 adult educators and 30 parents in order to directly involve them in co-creating the contents of the future Skills4Parents outputs.
These findings were compiled in national reports (soon available online) in which partners examined the skills and skill gaps for adult educators and parents as well as feedback on key channels for skills transmission. As part of the national documents, partners also provided recommendations for next steps in creating the guide and online platform. The reports were analysed and summarised in a comparative European report.
The report examines the national and European (section I) in which it was made, the project’s co-creation process with the target groups (section II), skills validation – the skills and skill gaps for both groups (section III), skills transmission – key channels for skills transmission (section IV), with conclusions for the next steps in developing the Skills4Parents learning packages (section V).
See full report here and its annex with existing practices to support parents.