Family Lives was formed over 45 years ago by volunteers, with the aim of ensuring that all parents had somewhere to turn before they reached crisis point by providing a dedicated organisation to support parents.

We know that the right support at the right time makes all the difference. Family Lives provides targeted early intervention and crisis support to families who are struggling. We support families with a wide range of issues including children’s early development, challenging relationships and behaviour, and emotional and mental wellbeing.

We are a volunteer-led organisation with around 200 volunteers across our different services. We simply could not do what we do without them, alongside our dedicated team of staff. Many of our volunteers began their relationship with us as service users but have stayed to support others on their journey. This is a testament to the support they themselves received. We have many different volunteering opportunities available based both at home and in local communities.

Our crisis support, provided through our helpline, chat and email services, has always been at the heart of what we do. We also have long-standing programmes in the areas we work in across England, providing support to thousands of families through our befriending, outreach and home-visiting services.

Since our beginnings, Family Lives has supported families from the very first days of becoming a parent through to the teenage years and beyond. We are proud to offer support across the age range so that families can turn to us whenever they need us.

Over the last few years, we have seen an escalation in calls from family members relating to concerns about the levels of violence that children and young people are using against them. This has resulted in our call-handlers raising concerns about the significant risk to parents/carers and other family members, as well as to the children themselves. To explore this issue in more detail, we undertook a data review to examine the ways in which child aggression and violence manifests itself in the family home, and to identify some of the

underlying contexts that callers shared with us in our report Feeling Under Siege. You can read this report on our website.

We are committed to supporting families experiencing child to parent aggression and violence, and are proud to be working with amazing organisations such as PEGS to raise awareness of the increase of child to parent aggression and violence, and the support available.