Contact Thriving Together

Building A, First Floor Offices, Green Court, Truro Business Park, Threemilestone, Truro, TR4 9LF

Email the Thriving Together team

Meet the team

Thriving Together

This is a service to support early family relationships for parents, carers, infants and children under 5 across Cornwall.

Our pledge

  • We are non-judgemental, non-discriminatory, and work to be culturally informed and inclusive in our work.
  • Our service will develop by learning from you, our service users, and we will involve you in future service development.

Research, locally and nationally, will inform our clinical interventions and will determine our team training requirements to ensure that you receive the very best evidence-based care and intervention from your specialist practitioner.

What is parent-infant mental health?

Our early experiences shape our brains and affect our lifelong health, behaviour, and learning. A secure, warm, responsive, and predictable relationship between parents (or carers) and child is crucial to healthy, emotional, physical, and intellectual development.

Our development and early mental health, from birth to the age of 5, is influenced by our relationship with our parents and family as well as where we live. Sometimes children and families benefit from some extra help to develop their relationship.

When help is received earlier, it will improve the outcome for the child and help lay down secure foundations for their future development.

What are the aims of Thriving Together?

Thriving Together aims to strengthen parents or carers so that they can enjoy their relationship with their child, and help them feel confident in being a parent.

Thriving Together also aims to support the development of the child’s emotional wellbeing.

Who is the service for?

Thriving Together can offer a range of support and advice to parents, from pregnancy, who are struggling to develop a positive relationship with their child.

This could be for a variety of reasons, for example:

  • it may have been a difficult pregnancy
  • the parent or carer may feel they are struggling to make an emotional connection with their infant or child
  • their child may be affected by separation anxiety or may not be developing emotionally in the way that is expected

Thriving Together is also there to help parents and carers whose own experiences may be impacting on their ability to be a parent.

How does Thriving Together support families?

Thriving Together provide support and help to families and babies and children under 5 years of age. It is a multi-agency and multi-disciplinary consultation group made up of the referrer, members from the Thriving Together team, such as a psychologist, child psychotherapist, nurse and educational psychologist and representatives from agencies.

These professionals will meet to discuss how Thriving Together can help build a positive relationship between the parent or carer and child. They will put together an individualised plan of how best to support the family and if needed, offer specialist therapy sessions.

We strive to be a neurodiverse and trauma informed team.

Support that may be offered to families could include:

How can you be referred to Thriving Together?

If parent or carer, are struggling to build a relationship with their child, they can ask their early years practitioner, health visitor, midwife, family or social worker to refer them to the Thriving Together service.

The professional worker will complete a CAMHS referral form to the Early Help Hub. They will then be invited to talk to the Thriving Together team about the concerns of the parent.

Thriving Together consultation group

The Thriving Together consultation group is for professionals who are working with a parent-infant or child relationship they are concerned about.

The consultation group is made up of infant mental health specialists across Cornwall. The referrer will talk to the group about the parent-infant or child relationship and the group, using the language of the Solihull Approach (containment, reciprocity and behaviour management) will generate a plan of the next positive steps.

Following the group a written version of these understandings are sensitively generated for the referrer to feed back to the family.

Professionals are also encouraged to contact the Thriving Together team if they want to talk through the case before they decide to refer to the group.

The child and family may then be referred to services such as:

Resources

Thriving Together resources

Bereavement

Mindfulness

Parenting and children’s mental health and attachment

Resources for professionals

Self-help CBT

Short-term parent-child psychotherapy

Sleep resources

Substance misuse (drugs and alcohol)