Here are specific ways perinatal peer supporters can utilize the framework and its components:
1. Providing a Common Reference Point for Consistent Advice
The framework helps create cohesion across the early years system and ensures consistency of advice for families encountering numerous practitioners.
• Standardise Language: Peer supporters can use the three Domains of Caregiving to describe important aspects of parenting in clear, consistent terms.
• Focus on Early Mental Health: The framework reinforces that supporting a child's emotional health begins in early childhood, from pregnancy onward. Peer supporters can use this emphasis to validate the importance of early interactions, particularly responding to the baby's cues, which is crucial for emotional development.
2. Focusing Support on Key Caregiving Skills
Perinatal peer supporters can introduce specific skills from the framework that are highly relevant to the early parent-infant relationship:
• Nurturing the Relationship: Peer supporters can encourage skills to help parents notice and interpret their baby's cues, responding to needs in a timely way.
• Expressing Warmth and Positive Regard: Peer supporters can model or encourage expressing warmth, affection, and acceptance toward the baby, which is foundational for positive relationships.
• Promoting Playful Interactions: They can support sharing playful and enjoyable interactions that are baby-led, developmentally appropriate, and suitable in their timing.
3. Supporting Caregiver Self-Capacity
Peer supporters can help parents recognise and build confidence in:
• Emotional and Behavioural Regulation: Peer supporters can help parents monitor and manage their own feelings and behaviours, especially when dealing with the stress of a newborn.
• Self-Efficacy: Peer supporters can focus on building the parent's self-confidence in their caregiving skills and fostering a sense of self-assurance.
• Empathy and Perspective: Peer supporters can facilitate the parent's capacity to recognize and consider the baby's perspective, helping them interpret the baby's behavior in terms of their feelings, desires, and needs (e.g., why a baby might be crying).
4. Navigating Support Levels and Contextual Challenges
Peer supporters can use the framework to guide families toward additional services when needed:
• Identifying Support Needs: The framework provides a resource to help practitioners consider which types of support might best meet a family's needs at different times. For example, a parent struggling to nurture the relationship with their baby might need specialist support from a specialized parent-infant relationship team.
• Addressing Structural Pressures: The framework acknowledges that worries about housing and food insecurity, poverty, and economic pressures can make it harder for caregivers to acquire and maintain skills. Peer supporters can listen to a parent's worries or concerns around these issues and also connect families to other specialist support services to reduce these pressures.
• Promoting Shared Care: Peer supporters can encourage the development of a strong and reliable network of individuals (e.g., family members or friends) to provide "Shared care".
