Reducing Parental Conflict

Conflict between parents happens and is a normal process that occurs in all relationships, however, if the conflict is frequent, intense and unresolved, this can have a damaging impact on children.

Professionals who come into regular contact with children and/or families are well placed to identify, explore and support those experiencing destructive conflict and reduce this potential negative impact.

The Reducing Parental Conflict (RPC) programme is aimed at conflict below the threshold of domestic abuse.

The GSPC grant from the DwP has now ended, we commissioned Tavistock Relationships who delivered a series of workshop for practitioners in 2021/22, including train the trainer sessions. They also have recorded a webcast that will be launched when we launch our series of webcasts in July 2022.

The aims of the project were to:

Strengthen existing knowledge and skills across Children’s Social Care (including Early Help), Health, Police, Schools and community organisations, on both how to identify parental conflict, how to respond- including increased knowledge of local specialist services that are available, so families can be better informed and offered services that are more likely to be successful for them.

For practitioners to develop their understanding of the difference between Domestic Abuse and Parental Conflict, how to identify concerns and appropriate interventions and develop the skills to communicate this to families when appropriate and think about how to start conversations about parental conflict.

Raise awareness of Mentalisation-based therapy to help practitioners understand and better support parents where there is conflict and be skilled in undertaking preparation work with families before they engage with identified specialist services.

Find out what reducing parental conflict is and how it is different to domestic abuse here, there is also a useful video on why RPC matters to children’s services on this site.  Reducing Parental Conflict: what is parental conflict? – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk) 

There is a printable leaflet summarising RPC here: DWP handout RPC

The DwP are renewing the RPC grant for 2022/3/4 and this will now be led by Children’s Social Care.