HENRY (Health, Exercise, Nutrition for the really young)

The Best Start with HENRY service in City & Hackney is supporting local families with children, from 0-5 – to provide a healthy, happy start in life for their children and the whole family on topics such as starting solids, fussy eating, eating well for less and healthy mealtimes.

Providing a healthy, happy start for young children helps lay the foundations for a brighter future where children flourish throughout childhood and beyond.

What happens in childhood has lifelong effects on our health and wellbeing. HENRY supports families to provide the best possible start in life for babies and children.

At HENRY we are passionate about babies and children getting the best possible start in life. This means supporting the whole family to make positive lifestyle changes, creating healthier and happier home environments, and building healthier communities.

Over the past 12 years we have supported thousands of families to transform family life for the better in all sorts of ways – including improved nutrition, emotional wellbeing, parenting skills, breastfeeding, and getting more active. We have worked with over 15,000 health and early years practitioners and collaborated with NHS trusts, local authorities, and many other partners.

Laying the foundations for a brighter future
What happens in childhood has a profound bearing on life chances and on physical and emotional health throughout childhood and beyond. Parents want the best for their children, but it isn’t always easy for parents to know what ‘best’ is, or to change entrenched family habits to provide a healthier home environment.

HENRY provides a wide range of support for families from pregnancy to age 12 including workshops, programmes, resources and online help. All of our support for families is underpinned by the HENRY approach to supporting behaviour change which helps parents gain the confidence, knowledge and skills they need to help the whole family adopt a healthier, happier lifestyle and to give their children a great start in life.

We also work with health, early years, and family support practitioners, helping them develop the skills to support families make real and lasting changes that will help the whole family have a brighter future.

Our focus
We view ‘a healthy start’ in its broadest possible sense, adopting a holistic approach that focuses on the things that have a real impact in later life. This includes supporting breastfeeding, improving nutrition, emotional wellbeing, parenting skills, healthy nutrition, oral health and a more active lifestyle. By focusing on these elements we can reduce the risk of tooth decay, obesity and associated diseases (such as diabetes, cancer and heart disease), as well as improve school readiness and future life chances.

What is consistent across all the issues we address is the way we work with families – working in partnership with parents as they are the experts on their own lives and families. We never tell families what to do – no one likes to be told, and telling simply doesn’t work. Instead, we support parents to identify the things they are doing well and the things they would like to change, helping them build on strengths and decide on their own strategies to achieve their goals.

We recognise that a healthy start is not purely a matter of individual choice; family, cultural and environmental influences also play a major role. To achieve our mission we will promote and support healthier lifestyles and environments at all levels – individual, community and population. We believe that:

• A healthy start is a whole family affair. Babies and young children are dependent on the choices their parents make for them and will learn from parental modelling, so we need to work with the whole family.

• A healthy family means the best start for babies and young children in the widest possible sense. Parenting, emotional wellbeing and opportunities to learn and grow through active play – as well as a healthy lifestyle habits – are all part of enabling young children to flourish.

• Parents want to do their best for their children. Help and support should build on this desire, working in partnership with parents to help them give their children a great start.

• Praise and encouragement are more effective than blame and judgement. Parents need to be valued for who they are and what they can do.

• We need to start where parents are. Families face different challenges and some are more ready to make changes than others. Those in a helping role are more effective when they are able to get alongside families, listen to what they have to say and gain an understanding of their strengths, needs, challenges and priorities.

• The messenger is just as important as the message. Helping families adopt a healthier lifestyle requires more than dietary advice and information. Sensitive, strengths-based and solution-focused support, which draws on evidence-based partnership and motivational models of helping, is more effective in enabling changes in lifestyle behaviour and habits.

• We need to prioritise babies and young children. Habits are established very early in life and it is easier to form healthy habits right from the start than it is to break less healthy ones later. For example, only 1 in 20 children who start school obese will be a healthy weight when they leave primary school.

• Practitioners have more credibility when they model a healthy lifestyle. Practitioners’ self-awareness of their own lifestyle and commitment to making positive changes in their own lives are key elements in providing effective support.

• We need to know what works and to provide the most effective interventions we can. Poor mental health, oral health and unhealthy weight have been described as ticking timebombs, with potentially devastating consequences for individuals, society and health services. The causes are complex; reducing and preventing rates of these conditions requires a joined-up approach informed by up-to-date research evidence.

Go to www.henry.org.uk/hackney

Email hcsupport@henry.org.uk or info@henry.org.uk

Call 07519109876 or 01865 302973