Contact information

  • Email the Thriving Together team
  • Dr Wendy Shallcross, principal child and adolescent psychotherapist and clinical lead for Thriving Together
  • Dr Christine Volney, child and adolescent psychotherapist and operational lead for Thriving Together

Thriving Together

A pilot project to support early family relationships for parents, carers, infants and children under 5 across Cornwall.

Thriving Together supports parent-infant mental health across Cornwall by strengthening parents’ confidence and their capacity to understand and enjoy their relationship with their baby or child.  It is for professionals and anyone working with a child under 5 who would like more support in their work. Thriving Together works with existing services and brings together experts across agencies.

This pilot is for parents and carers:

  • who are struggling in relationships with infants and children under 5
  • who struggle to feel emotionally connected with their infants or young children
  • whose young children struggle to separate
  • with experiences that are impacting on parenting
  • who have concerns about an infant or young child’s emotional development
  • mothers’ who experienced difficult pregnancies
  • family experience of trauma

What is Thriving Together?

Supporting and strengthening relationships between babies and their carers.

Thriving Together offers direct work with parents and carers, including specialist therapeutic intervention where families may be experiencing difficulties. The multi-disciplinary team also use their expertise to help the local workforce understand and support parent-infant relationships

For information and advice email the Thriving Together team.

  • "Investing in the emotional wellbeing of our babies is a wonderful way to invest in the future"
  • "Early relationships shape babies' social and emotional development and influence many key outcomes"
  • "Early relationships between babies and their parents are incredibly important for building healthy brains"

Quotes are from the Patient Infant Foundation.

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:

The family may receive interventions from Thriving Together:

Resources

Additional resources

Parenting and children’s mental health and attachment

Short-term parent-child psychotherapy

For parents and carers:

For professionals:

Dads

Self-help CBT

Mindfulness

Bereavement

Substance misuse (drugs and alcohol)