CHILD’ S PLA Y Samantha Laurie e-mail:
samlaurie@btconnect.com Right from the start
Being a new mother can be tough. For some it even leads to despair. Samantha Laurie salutes a network of volunteers helping mums through those difficult days
S
usan, 38, was a high-flying publishing director before she had her first child. She was confident, outgoing and assured. So it was a shock to find herself, six months later, breaking down in Starbucks in Richmond, convinced that her fellow mums were judging her critically on account of her crying baby. Overwhelmed, panicked and unable to make it to her baby’s scheduled hospital appointment, she called the only person she could think of: her Home-Start volunteer.
Practical
Home-Start is a national charity that organizes a small army of parent volunteers to help other families going through rough patches; families who might be struggling with post-natal depression, loneliness, isolation, bereavement, illness, multiple births or anything else that threatens to tip them over the edge. Its volunteers are trained to listen, advise and offer practical help for a couple of hours each week – anything from giving stressed mums some precious time away from a toddler to accompanying them on hospital visits. It’s the kind of assistance that might once have come from an extended family member – an older sister, a mother or an aunt. All help is free and confidential and can be accessed by anyone with a child under five, either via a health visitor or doctor, or by contacting the charity directly. As such, it is one of the very few family charities – perhaps the only one – that cuts across all social boundaries, recognizing that in a modern world short on extended family, new mothers can feel devastatingly friendless and alone.
Susan is typical of those who slip through the net – a middle ground of mums who don’t feel that they are vulnerable enough to ask for help, but who are overwhelmed by loneliness and social isolation after having their first child. An only child, whose peers had yet to have children of their own, Susan had no experience of babies and, with elderly parents hundreds of miles away, no family support. Moving from Central London to Richmond, she found herself desperately trying to learn parenting from books. Any book she could get her hands on, she read. “I was constantly trying to find a manual with explanations that matched the behaviour of my baby,” she explains.
www.richmondmagazine.c o .uk Slowly but surely, her confidence ebbed
away. Post-natal support was limited at best: at the baby clinic she never saw the same person twice, while the health check consisted simply of completing a form and sending it back. Unable to admit to her husband or friends that she wasn’t coping, Susan finally found herself in London’s Hyde Park, standing beside the Serpentine Lake, contemplating throwing herself in. Tentatively she emailed Home-Start.
Within a week a volunteer co-ordinator had been for a chat and assigned her a volunteer for weekly visits.
“It was the start of my recovery,” she
admits. “From then on I had this visit to look forward to; a friendly face to come with me to the children’s farm, or the park. Someone who would listen to how I felt.” The only requirement of volunteers is that they themselves are parents, so that – whatever their situation – they understand the challenges of parenting. This is what makes them invaluable to mums like Sona, from Kew, whose five-year-old son has a rare developmental syndrome.
“I see so many professionals, I just wanted someone to talk to freely, loosely, casually,” she says. “Someone who just knows what it’s like to be a mum.” Sona’s volunteer came with her to hospital appointments, helping with her younger child and listening to the concerns that those with special needs children often find hard to share with their own families.
Encouragement
Even mums who have their families around them can benefit from Home-Start. “You don’t have to be on your own to feel on your own,” says Louise, a single mum from Hampton with a history of addiction. Her volunteer offered a non-judgemental shoulder to cry on, along with the encouragement to attend one of the weekly playgroups run by Home-Start for mums struggling to join mainstream activities. In all, there are more than 300 Home-
Starts in the UK. In Richmond, where 75 volunteers look after 200 families, services have grown substantially over the past two years at the request of the local authority, which provides most of the funding. Three times a year, the Richmond branch runs courses for new volunteers – one day per week for 10 weeks – to train up the 45 new volunteers annually required.
Posed by models
Image courtesy Home-Start But while the effectiveness of Home-
Start is a given – David Cameron singled it out earlier this year as one of the few bodies with a proven track record in reaching needy families – its funding will almost certainly come under pressure. It’s a danger that Angie Ahmed, marketing officer of the Richmond branch, is keen to avoid. “We are a preventative service,” she says. “If we can keep families from breaking down in a crisis, enabling them to cope better and emerge from the supervision of social services, we are making a huge difference to their lives and reducing the potential cost to the public of supporting them in the future.”
Loneliness, warn mental health experts, is the most debilitating modern malaise. Despite – or perhaps because of – the explosion in communications technology, almost half of Britons feel that this is a lonelier generation. In such times, the kindness, guidance and compassion of someone who grasps the difficulties of early years parenting can make all the difference. There are Home-Start schemes in Richmond,
Epsom, Ewell & Banstead, Farnham & Haslemere, Guildford, Redhill, Reigate & Horley, Elmbridge and Woking. For more about volunteering or accessing the services call: 0800 068 6368. Alternatively visit:
www.home-start.org.uk
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