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Healthy beginnings at Midlothian Sure Start
Midlothian Sure Start is the first prize winner of our 2007 Integrated Health Awards, and is on the shortlist for 2008. It provides services for vulnerable families with very young children. As well as dealing with the challenge of parenting a naturally demanding age group, many parents are dealing with their own difficulties, which range from poverty, to isolation, to drug addiction.
Midlothian Sure StartChildren are encouraged to eat foods that parents tell us they would never eat at home. They brush their teeth.
Although there are Sure Start schemes across the country, few are as innovative as the Midlothian schemes. While children play together in a creche, parents are given a chance to talk through their situation and gain new skills.
There's an emphasis on healthy eating. Children attending the centre are only offered healthy food like water, milk, and fruit with their toast. Parents have the opportunity to go on cookery courses - some say that they've learned for the first time how to prepare good food for their families. They can buy affordable fruit and vegetables at Sure Start.
There's also the opportunity for parents to enjoy complementary therapies - especially massage and aromatherapy. Parents found massage useful for a whole range of chronic complaints, such as mild depression, back pain and the aftermath of drug addiction.
There's a Back to Work course, that helps people to believe that they can return to work as well as offering practical advice. One parent commented 'slowly my attitude has changed from not being able to do things to thinking yes, I can do this.'
ParentMy son... gets to interact with other children of different ages, which is great because we don't have any other young children in our family.
For some, coming from very difficult situations, the Sure Start scheme has clearly been a life saver. One heroin user has moved onto prescription methadone, and has stuck with it for the last year. She comments 'I've redecorated the house, changed my hair style, stopped drugs, learnt how to manage money and started to make lots of jewellery.' For others, the challenges have been more subtle: one person raised in a single-parent family said that it helped him to think through what the role of a father in a family could be like.
However paternalism is markedly absent from the way the project is run. There's not a strict divide between service providers and users, and half of the Board of Midlothian Sure Start is reserved for past or present attendees. Initially there was great scepticism about this, with psychiatric social workers commenting that this approach could never work. But it has, and now many different agencies refer to the popular scheme.
In 2008, the Sure Start schemes have work to bring in grandparents and the wider community to their centres. They have also put greater emphasis on catching families at the very beginning of their child's life - and sometimes even before birth. It means that if mothers are suffering with postnatal depression, they have somewhere to turn. One mother said ‘I thought I was going to be a perfect mum and that post-natal depression is for people who aren’t much good. Then my son was born and I cried for weeks.’ Having attended a post-natal depression class, she now contributes to the project by teaching literacy.