What NH can offer you - Parents

What Newbold Hope can offer you.

Here at Newbold Hope we want to make finding help and support as easy as possible. With this in mind, we have compiled a list of what we consider the most useful information for you, as professionals, in your role of supporting families.

Newbold Hope – how we can help you and your team to effectively support families of children with difficult and dangerous behaviour episodes.

Introduction

Newbold Hope is a parent-led organisation. We support families and the staff who work with them to develop the knowledge, skills and confidence to be able to help to reduce episodes of violence and other forms of difficult and dangerous behaviour in children and young people in terms of intensity, frequency and duration.

We are CPD accredited and able to offer training, webinars, consultancy, and a range of other initiatives.

It is well-documented that anxiety levels are rapidly increasing in school-age children and young people. When a child or young person becomes anxious, they experience it as feeling frightened, unsafe, threatened, distressed and confused. When these emotions reach overwhelming levels in children the “fight or flight” response can be triggered, which can result in childhood violence and other forms of extreme behaviour.

These sorts of behaviours are particularly prevalent in children and young people who have a disability or an additional need, and the vast majority of the work which Newbold Hope does is focused on this community of families. However, we know that The Newbold Hope approach also works very well with all children and young people who have anxiety-led behaviour difficulties.

Newbold Hope was founded by Yvonne Newbold who is supported by a small team of volunteers. Everyone on the team is a parent of a child with a history of extreme violent, difficult and dangerous behaviour.

Our whole approach is informed by what has actually worked successfully in families from our community. Everything is grounded in real-life experience and is designed to strengthen this particular group of immensely vulnerable families.

As part of our work, we run a digital community for parents of children and young people who can become physically violent towards others. In most cases, this violence is directed to members of their own family – their parents, their brothers and sisters and their extended family.

This digital community informs all our work. They tell us what works and what doesn’t. They share their thoughts and fears about the often-traumatic home-based situations they are dealing with, and their fears for their child’s future.

Every day, we hear real-life experiences, and how easily a very difficult situation can be made worse by the lack of understanding about childhood violence within the wider population. This can often lead to blame, shame and judgement directed towards the parents due to their children’s behaviour and can cause long-term damage to the whole family.

Due to our work, we have received over 4,000 messages of thanks from families who have successfully enabled their children and young people to move past these very difficult times and towards much happier and calmer times, with a much more promising and hopeful future to look forward to.

We asked the parents in our digital community about where their child’s extreme behaviour was more likely to happen. Nearly 1,500 families replied, and their responses indicated that childhood violence was 15 times more likely to happen at home than at school. When a child becomes physically violent towards family members in their own home, it doesn’t get recorded and no incident reports are completed. This means that no evidence has been collated to identify the needs of this cohort of families, so no services have been designed around these needs.

Below are several links to our work – it would be great if you could share this with colleagues across education, health and social care services or with anyone else that might find it helpful.

Many thanks,

Yvonne

Yvonne Newbold MBE, Founder, Newbold Hope

Some suggested links to further information and reading:

Yvonne’s TED Talk

In August 2022, the NHS invited Yvonne to be one of their ten speakers at their annual TEDx event. This TED Talk was so well-received that a year later, in August 2023, it was selected by TED to be included on their Global Ted platform where it has now been translated into nine languages, and it has achieved over 1,000,000 views in less than six months. It is only 18 minutes long and explains the likely underlying causes of extreme behaviour in children and what you can do to help. It also explains that these behaviour episodes are not the parent nor the child’s fault when they do happen. Yvonne has received hundreds of messages from all over the world from people telling her that this talk has changed their thinking, or the way they practice, or helped them to understand and to reconnect with their own child Here’s the link: -

How to meet your child’s difficult behaviour with compassion. TED.com Talk by Yvonne Newbold MBE

Ted Talk

Our “Twelve Top Tips” for Professional Staff

We know how hard it can be for staff working with children to access training about anxiety-led behaviour in children and young people. To help to fill this gap in training, we have produced a factsheet for professionals which explains, in 12 points, why anxiety-led difficult and dangerous behaviour can happen, and which approaches are likely to work best.

Top Tips for Professional

With the help of our Newbold Hope Community of families, we have written two reports, one called “If only they’ listened…”, which has dozens of direct quotes from parents about the devastating outcomes they experienced because they were turned away when they asked for help. The other report is about the long-term damage that wrongfully blaming parents can do to the whole family. You may find them both interesting as well, but you are very welcome to share them with professionals in your child’s team .

“If only they’d listened…”

A report produced by Newbold Hope which 3,000 UK families contributed towards, all about what happens when families don’t get the help they need early enough -

If only they'd listened Report

How Families are Failed by Health, Education and Social Services

Our report on how SEND families are being consistently failed by our public sector services, and the devastating impact this can have.

Parent Blame Report

The Special Parent’s Handbook

This is the Amazon Number One Bestseller which was written by Yvonne. In it, she tells her family story and shares all that she learnt as a parent of a child with profound and multiple disabilities as well as having complex medical needs. At the end of every chapter, there are tips, tricks and strategies to help families navigate every aspect of SEND parenting.

Yvonne's Book

There are dozens of written resources on this website about various aspects of difficult and dangerous behaviour. Here are three suggested pages to share with parents at the start of their journey with a child who has extreme behaviour issues.

Violent and Challenging Behaviour – the basics

In thirty points, this explains why difficult and dangerous behaviour can develop in children and young people with disabilities or additional needs, and how to best support them.

The Basics

The link between anxiety and meltdown

This explains why anxiety can cause extreme behaviour to develop, and the best approaches to use with this group of children.

Anxiety and Meltdowns

Our Top Ten videos

This is a series of ten videos which are each only about five minutes long. Each video deals with a different aspect of how to reduce extreme behaviour. They can all be watched in less than an hour, and taken together, they are like a mini course in how too turn a child’s behaviour around.