The Door's Family Face Time brings together whole families for support: this unique approach of supporting families both as individuals and as a group has amazing results.
Family Support Worker Sandra Mason, says:
“By supporting parents and young people together they get the tools to support each other away from sessions – enabling them to move forward together.”
“Meeting with families as a whole is a more realistic way of supporting family breakdown – having the full range of perspectives makes it a lot easier to solve issues together and work through them as a unit instead of ‘he said, she said’. It helps to give the young people a voice in the meetings and at home, improve communication at home and build up the relationships.”
Small achievements can mean so much—things that may appear easy and simple from the outside can require some complex navigation to work through, but as Sandra says “getting to those points is amazing!”
This is the Hodgson's Story:
For some, family life can be pretty chaotic. The Hodgsons were no exception. Home life was challenging, not just for them but for their neighbours too. Following a complaint about noise, the family reached out to The Door for help.
The Family Support team quickly established weekly family meetings, enabling all family members to express their views and opinions somewhere other than at home. Alongside this, each person had valuable one-to-one time with mentors and support workers giving them space to talk about their frustrations and dreams, and about what was happening inside and outside the family. Both parents also attended the ‘Triple P’ Programme.
This combination has had a radical effect on the whole family – progress is being made in big and small ways, from spending more time together without arguing, to going out for coffee together, and one of the children turning things around at school. All round every family member is happier, achieving more , and the noise level has reduced too.
“We really thought it would be impossible to turn things around in our household but we've learnt a way, thanks to Sandra”
Family Face Time is partly funded by donations made during the 2017 Christmas Challenge where public donations were matched by the Four Acre Trust, Murrays Estate Agents, Renishaw plc, MBS Systems, Hobbs House and Inforsight.
It costs just £10 for The Door to start working with a family and to give them this potentially life changing support. Donate today at thedoor.org.uk/donate and start helping families help themselves to put their lives back on track.
