About Us
Home-Start Hillingdon is a charity that offers befriending and practical help to parents with young children. Our support is free, confidential and non-judgemental, in fact almost 25% of families refer themselves to Home-Start which speaks for itself. Home-Start aims to help parents to give their children the best possible start in life and supports parents as they grow in confidence, improve their relationship with their children and widen their links with the local community.
Ours is a unique service, recruiting and training volunteers, who are usually parents themselves, to visit families with at least one child under 5 at home to offer friendly support. We also run a Family Group, once weekly during term time, which is attended by families for whom home-visiting support is not appropriate for a range of reasons.
Home-Start works towards the increased confidence and independence of the family by:
- Friendly support through difficult times for as long as help is needed.
- Understanding that when bringing up children, problems are not unusual.
- Reassurance that they are not alone.
- A listening ear and a shoulder to cry on.
- An extra pair of hands to help cope with every-day situations.
- Practical help with activities like playing or story time and to support parents to get out with young children.
Our volunteers help parents going through difficult times including:
- Loneliness and isolation.
- Lone parenting.
- Parent’s and/or children’s ill health, disability or special needs.
- Coping with twins, triplets or several pre-school children.
- First time parenthood or coping with new babies.
- Mental ill health including postnatal illness.
- Managing children’s behaviour.
- Relationship difficulties.
