Parents 1st UK’s Founder is awarded MBE in 2025 King’s Honours List
Celia Suppiah has been awarded an MBE in the 2025 King’s Honours List for services to families during pregnancy to early childhood!
This well-deserved recognition reflects her dedication to championing parent-to-parent support to help give every baby the best possible start in life.
Please join us in congratulating Celia on this huge honour — we couldn’t be prouder!
International Fathers’ Mental Health Day 2025
The mental health of dads is often left unspoken, but research has found that approximately 1 in 10 new dads experience postpartum depression and many more deal with anxiety, stress, and challenges with identity during the transition to parenthood.
Find out more about how you can support fathers during this time, and how to take the first step in improving dads’ mental health.
It's time to normalise the conversation...
Infant Mental Health Week - 9th-15th June 2025
This year's theme, "Who is Holding the Baby?", aims to shine a light on gaps in services that support these vulnerable babies and their families. Not everyone bonds easily with their baby. Parents who are overwhelmed by trauma, or struggling with mental or physical health difficulties, often need support.
So, we asked our highly experienced team of Pregnancy Pal and Birth Buddy peer supporters how they help parents to create a bond with their babies.
Maternal Mental Health Awareness Week
This year’s theme is "Your voice, your strength". This campaign highlights the power of women knowing that it is okay to express their needs, feelings and experiences.
What the Essex team have been up to!
2025 has been a busy year so far for our Essex team! Read on to find out more about some of the activities we've run in local communities from January to March.
Celebrating the first Lullaby Projects in Essex
Together with our project partners, Live Music Now and B3 – Bumps, Birth and Belonging, we ran our first Lullaby Projects in Basildon and Tendring between January and March.
Parents 1st UK launch new 5 year strategy
"This five-year strategy isn’t just a plan, it’s a reflection of the voices, hopes and ideas of our whole community. Parents, volunteers, staff and partners all contributed to shaping where we go next, and it’s their energy, insights and belief that give this strategy its heartbeat."
The Lullaby Trust Safer Sleep Week March 2025
The Lullaby Trust's national awareness campaign gives advice and information that helps to reduce the risk of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). Following the Lullaby Trust advice for every sleep, day and night has helped save 30,000 babies since 1991!
Parents 1st UK announce new CEO
It is with great pleasure that we announce the appointment of Paula Beare as the new Chief Executive Officer of Parents 1st UK. Together, we will build on our strong foundation and strive to create an even greater impact for parents and families.
Parents 1st volunteers visit Buckingham Palace!
Two of our longstanding volunteers from our Essex based programme - Parents 1st Essex - were invited to attend a garden party at Buckingham Palace in May in recognition of their community volunteering work. The royal garden parties are an important way to recognise public service.
Our wonderful volunteers share their experiences in our latest blog...
Lord-Lieutenant of Essex presents Parents 1st Essex with the King's Award for Voluntary Service
On the 16 May 2024, Parents 1st UK’s volunteers (both past and present), staff, supporters and guests gathered at the Essex Community Foundation Hub in Chelmsford to celebrate winning the King’s Award for Voluntary Service.
Equivalent to a MBE, this award recognises outstanding work by volunteer groups to benefit local communities.
Funding and Finance: Parents 1st UK joins the Hearts & Minds Smart Space as a Guest Trainer
The Hearts & Minds Partnership launched Smart Space, an online digital training platform, in December 2022, to further support Voluntary Community Sector (VCS) services in perinatal mental health.
Parents 1st UK’s founder, Celia Suppiah, shares her knowledge and expertise as the guest trainer on ‘Module 5: An introduction to funding and finance’.
Joining Dave Monk on BBC Radio Essex's 'Volunteer Voices', Parents 1st's Programme Managers, Emma and Audrey and volunteer Annette discussed all things volunteering!
You can listen online to the interview and find out more about all the different volunteering roles available with Parents 1st Essex. (Interview STARTS around 1:08:10)
Working with parents during pregnancy, birth and beyond, you really could help to make a difference of a lifetime!
If you'd like to get in touch to find out more, email [email protected] or call us on 01268 525758
Make Birth Better: Birth trauma
Pregnancy and birth are expected to be a positive and happy experience. Unfortunately though, this isn’t always the case. Birth trauma alone affects at least 1 in 4 women and 1 in 25 of these women will develop PTSD.
Make Birth Better aims to raise awareness of the impact of birth trauma, offers support to parents, families and professionals who have gone through trauma, provides training to those working with parents, and aids others in vital research.
Read more about what birth trauma is, how it can affect families and how peer support can help...
Strengthening peer support for dads: survey results
Support for dads during pregnancy, birth and after baby is born is often overlooked. Becoming a father is a major life change that can be a particularly challenging time and it vital to consider that fathers can develop perinatal mental health issues (either as a result of their partner's illness or independently).
As part of the work the Essex Peer to Parent Network is undertaking in Essex, Parents 1st has been researching what peer support is currently available for dads, and how this could be strengthened.
Redefining the volunteering model – digital solutions in a remote working world!
In the midst of COVID-19 when services had to move online, the need to improve digital solutions became apparent.
So, in early 2021, Parents 1st UK joined a funded collaborative project to improve digital capabilities, rethinking and redesigning processes to improve systems and experiences for volunteers.
Parents 1st leads exciting new partnership project to develop a coordinated Perinatal Mental Health Peer Support Collaborative
Operating in partnership with perinatal mental health services and five maternity hubs across Essex, this project will strengthen Essex’s peer support offer and create a hub of good practice to encourage evidence-based, effective, and safe perinatal peer support to grow and develop across Essex.
How important is peer support in the relationship between infant feeding and maternal mental health?
How to feed your baby is without doubt one of the most important issues you face as a parent. It can be a highly emotive issue that can often trigger feelings of guilt or regret.
We discuss how this can impact a mother's mental health and how peer support can help a parent navigate this important part of parenting.
Launch of The Royal Foundation's Centre for Early Childhood
Last Friday (18/06/21), The Royal Foundation launched a new Centre for Early Childhood to drive awareness of the extraordinary impact of the early years, in order to transform society for generations to come.
We share our thoughts on this launch...
How does collaborative working between professional services and community owned peer support initiatives benefit families?
Parents 1st UK CEO, Celia Suppiah, joined the 2021 Maternity and Midwifery Festival to talk about the unique contribution that peer support offers during pregnancy, birth and beyond and the huge difference it can make during this critical life transition.
Why is infant mental health so important and how can peer support help?
We share how powerful peer support can be in enabling parents to understand the vital role they play in nurturing early infant development and how it can help parents to create a secure, responsive relationship... #IMHAW21
Is it OK to have 'Just the One' while pregnant?
Pregnancy can feel overwhelming at times, and this may affect close relationships – like arguing more or feeling unheard by your partner. It can be tempting to have 'Just the one' drink when we’re feeling stressed but, as there is no known safe level of drinking during pregnancy, it’s best to avoid it entirely.
Parents 1st UK are working with OnePlusOne, a charity specialising in relationship skills, to raise awareness of the risks of drinking while pregnant and to promote a free online course to help pregnant women and their partners avoid alcohol during pregnancy.
Working for babies: Lockdown lessons from local systems
The First 1001 Days Movement have reviewed the response to the COVID-19 pandemic for babies by local health and social care systems in their latest report 'Working for Babies'.
Sally Hogg, Head of Policy and Campaigning at the Parent-Infant Foundation and Coordinator of the First 1001 Days Movement shares how the report findings relate to perinatal peer support, in particular, what the voluntary sector is doing well and recommendations of how we can support babies further.
Latest research on peer support in perinatal mental health
This new internship project report looks to review the effectiveness of peer support in the perinatal period, different peer support models and their effectiveness (pre-COVID) and potential ways to develop peer support further.
Whilst the report focuses mainly on reviewing what peer support is currently available in Scotland, there are relevant, informative, and generic findings that we can all learn from.
Lockdown lessons: virtual communities
Derby Community Parent Programme have generously shared some of the ways they kept community outreach going through lockdown. Find out how they kept parents, peer supporters and healthcare professionals connected through their online community groups in our latest blog...
Highlights from Parents 1st UK Virtual Conference 2020
Parents 1st UK hosted a two-day virtual conference to celebrate volunteering in pregnancy, birth and beyond. This event brought together the peer support community to launch a brand new community website, discuss how we can work together to ensure quality peer support flourishes across the UK, and how we can adapt and survive in these challenging times.
Lockdown lessons from across the globe
This month, Parents 1st UK CEO, Celia Suppiah, spoke with Vita Maiorano, Director of the Australian Centre for Social Innovation to hear how COVID-19 has impacted families across the globe and how The Family by Family Project adapted to providing virtual support to families across Australia.
The Parent People Boosts Project goes live!
Throughout 2020, thousands of volunteers, advocates, champions, neighbours and more stepped up to support parents across the country.
In recognition of this hard work, the Parent People Boost Project put together a limited series of digital care packages for all those who have listened, cared and supported parents through 2020.
Parents 1st UK was one of the early years charities that have collaborated in this project.
IMHAW: Seeing the world through babies' eyes
Infant mental health is central to the development of good mental, physical and emotional wellbeing for future generations.
The theme for 2020’s Infant Mental Health Awareness Week (IMHAW) is “Seeing the world through babies’ eyes”.
The brain and emotional development of babies is greatly influenced by their experiences of the world and those around them. These experiences are moulded by the interactions with their parents or primary caregivers and are the foundation of infant mental wellbeing.
Emma Finalyson explains how video (VIG) can be a powerful tool for enabling parents to see the world through babies' eyes...
Parents 1st UK attends roundtable discussion with The Duchess of Cambridge
Yesterday (22/09/20), Parents 1st UK and affiliate programme, Island House Community Parent Programme, were amongst the 8 organisations invited to a roundtable with The Duchess of Cambridge to discuss parent-to-parent support. Keen to learn about the different types of peer support available throughout the nation, Her Royal Highness invited experts in the field to share the impact their work has on parents’ health and wellbeing.
We share the key takeaways from the meeting in our latest blog...
How can volunteer initiatives reduce pressure on professional services?
Quality perinatal peer support can operate in collaboration with maternity and perinatal mental health services to address the gap in personalised, informal support that many parents need during pregnancy, birth and beyond.
"We’re not there to do the job of midwives, nurses, or any other professionals, but what we can do is offer women our time when it is most needed, allowing the professionals to do their jobs, knowing their patient has got the emotional support they need.”
Introducing Solace Peer Support
Solace (Solace Peer Support CIC) is a social enterprise, that believes that basic social support can make an enormous difference to the most vulnerable families.
Giving your child the best start to life, can be very difficult when facing the stress of homelessness/poor housing, extreme poverty and a range of other social challenges. The impacts of social deprivation during pregnancy and the initial postnatal period; can impact across all aspects of life, both short and long term...
Welcome to the home of good quality peer support in pregnancy, birth & beyond...
Anyone and everyone can find out more about developing a perinatal volunteer peer support initiative, access guidance and download FREE tools to get a new initiative up and running or develop an existing one.
The benefits of quality peer support to mothers, fathers, babies and communities are profound.
For this reason, Parents 1st have launched a brand-new website to enable more effective perinatal volunteering and peer support programmes to flourish.
