Overview

The Supporting Parents to Prevent and Delay AOD Use by Young People: A Guide for Local Drug Action Teams (the ‘Guide’) has been developed by the Alcohol and Drug Foundation to support Local Drug Action Teams (LDATs) to deliver effective parenting programs.

We hope the Guide will benefit communities across Australia by providing the evidence-based resources needed to implement high quality and effective parenting programs to prevent and delay alcohol and other drugs (AOD) use by young people.

The Guide draws on evidence from a number of fields including public health, alcohol and other drugs, and youth development and wellbeing. It was developed in consultation with Local Drug Action Teams.

Audience

The Guide has been developed for communities involved with the Alcohol and Drug Foundation’s Local Drug Action Team (LDAT) Program.

The Local Drug Action Team Program supports community organisations across Australia to work together to develop evidence-informed initiatives to prevent harms from alcohol and other drugs in their local area.

Local Drug Action Teams are a partnership of local organisations and may include local councils, health centres, youth services, employment agencies, sports teams, schools, businesses and police, among others.

This Guide supports community organisations from across different sectors, including organisations that don’t have expertise or experience in the alcohol and other drug field.

Purpose

The purpose of the Guide is to support Local Drug Action Teams to deliver parenting programs in their local community.

It is a ready reference manual, offering practical advice and guidance on how to deliver high-quality and effective parenting programs to equip parents with the knowledge and skills needed to prevent and delay alcohol and other drugs uptake by young people.

It will help LDATs to:

• ensure they have everything in place to deliver a successful parenting program
• streamline day-to-day operations
• deliver a program that is informed by evidence, and responsive to local data and needs
• build knowledge and understanding of how to prevent and minimise the harm caused by alcohol and other drugs
• support young people to live healthy and fulfilling lives unlimited by alcohol and drug harm.

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How to use this Guide

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This Guide provides LDATs with everything you need to deliver high quality parenting programs in your local community, including:

• Introduction to parenting programs (Section 2): Explores parenting and how parenting programs help to prevent alcohol and other drug use and harms.
• Program design and planning (Section 3): Provides a step-by-step guide to support LDATs through the process of planning a parenting program.
• Program delivery (Section 4): Supports LDATs to deliver parenting programs. It provides a number of sample resources including a session plan and presentation, and advice on promoting the program in the community.
• Program evaluation (Section 5): Supports LDATs to evaluate parenting sessions. It provides advice on measuring success, and a sample evaluation form is provided for adaptation and use in the community.
• Parenting program content (Section 6): Contains evidence-based content for parenting programs. It outlines what parents should know (core knowledge) and what parents can do (effective parenting practices) to reduce young people’s AOD use and harms.
• Working with different groups and cultures (Section 7): Supports LDATs to work with families from different groups and cultures to reduce AOD harms.
• Policies and procedures (Section 8): Provides policies and procedures to support LDATs to design, deliver and evaluate high-quality and effective parenting programs.
• Useful resources (Section 9): Provides links to useful resources.
• Glossary (Section 10): Contains key terms and definitions relevant to the prevention of alcohol and other drug harms and building strong and resilient communities

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