Information for Funders

Incredible Families delivers a complete training for practitioners across New Zealand in Watch, Wait and Wonder, an intervention developed and piloted in Dunedin, New Zealand and further researched in Toronto, Canada. Practitioners from the health, education and child protection sectors have attended training as it is one of the few interventions available for supporting changes in parenting when the early relationship is seriously problematic.

The intervention gives practitioners skills to work with parents and infants/young children (0–5 years) when a parent may not feel bonded to their child, fears hurting them or may have hurt them and the young child is likely to have emotional, behavioural and learning problems. These problems are sometimes talked about as disturbed attachment and the most concerning is the child who has a pattern of disorganised attachment.

We are also able to link up services and families with practitioners who are trained in the intervention or training and receiving supervision.

The Training Programme began in 2009. Most practitioners fit training into their work hours so it takes 2–3 years to become accredited for independent practice.

The Intervention is recommended by:

• Ministry of Health: Healthy Beginnings
• Ministry of Social Development: Gateway Programme
• UK Wave Trust
• UK Department of Education

All of the Incredible Families programmes have capacity to intervene early with children who have severe behavioural difficulties. Watch, Wait and Wonder does this earliest in a child’s life.

Each practitioner training sees at least three families and with the recommended supervision the majority of these infants and young children get back on track developmentally. If our intervention supports one infant or toddler not to become an anti-social adolescent we have been cost effective at this stage in the training programme. A New Zealand study estimated that the lifetime cost to society of a chronic antisocial male adolescent is $3 million (Inter-agency Plan for Conduct Disorder and Severe Anti-Social Behaviour 2007–2012 [2007] Published by the Ministry of Social Development).

We need your donation to support practitioners through their training.

Full Scholarship: $8,000
Half Scholarship: $4,000

Please help us to train more practitioners to work effectively with families in the early years.