Opportunities for parents - Strengthening families by supporting parents

The aim of the ESF Plus federal programme "Opportunities for parents" (ElternChanceN) is to provide targeted support to disadvantaged families by shoring up their resources for the development and education of their children through the establishment of model community networks to support parents. Families with little cultural and social capital will be given advice and support at an early stage regarding the developmental trajectories of their children. By bolstering early childhood education in families, children, especially from disadvantaged families, can benefit from infrastructural educational counselling and guidance from the networks’ services. In supporting families and parents, the programme follows the approach of targeting the needs of families consistently at an early stage within the framework of community approaches to prevention.

The programme is aimed at community family support organisations and independent child and youth welfare organisations. The goal is to integrate support for parents more tightly into cooperative forms of work in the social sphere and in the community context. To support parents in difficult situations in their lives, the programme aims to offer educational services that are tailored to the needs of the families, ranging from low-threshold services to formalised ones. This aims to shore up the resources of parents to support their children through educational guidance measures. Cooperation with the youth welfare office is obligatory for implementing parental guidance services in community networking structures.

Parental guidance services are a crucial factor in supporting families in promoting (early) childhood development. The main focus is to reach parents with low (earned) incomes and who are at risk of poverty, families with a migration or refugee background, and educationally disadvantaged families. Not only parents with younger children but also on families with children of primary school age are included in the scope of the programme.

It is the follow-up programme to the Opportunities for parents programme from the 2014-2020 ESF programming period.