We are ‘Supporting Young Bradford’, a research team part of Born in Bradford, the internationally renowned longitudinal cohort study. Supporting Young Bradford is one of the four projects funded by the Health Foundation’s research programme looking into emotional support for young people which is part of their young people’s future health inquiry. We have worked with both parents and young people from our Born in Bradford cohort and beyond to understand how families’ working lives impact on the quantity and quality of emotional support young people receive in their families. We know good and readily available emotional support is key to better mental health and wellbeing during adolescence and have found that differences in families’ employment that can led to varying levels of support, perpetuating further health inequalities. We have developed recommendations for employers which invites them to extend ‘family friendly’ working policies to parents and guardians of teenagers, as a way to support parents and young people but also ensure a happier and healthier current and future workforce.
As the project reaches its end, we wanted to ensure our findings have as wide a reach as possible, and we would like to give you the opportunity to hear about our work in more detail, and to discuss these findings and the relevance they have to your work along with other key stakeholders.
We hope you are able to come along and take part in this discussion, it would be fantastic to hear from you, and discuss some of the ways our findings might feed into your own work going forward and directions for future policy and further research.