Support & Services

For Parents

Are you confronting parenting-related challenges that seem insurmountable or beyond your ability to cope? You are not alone.

Parenting adolescents and young adults can be a trying experience. Parents face many challenges and concerns—from mental health and substance abuse to fostering the life skills to enable their young person to flourish.

HOPE offers support, information, and resources to parents and guardians throughout Ontario who are concerned about a teen or young adult child in their life.

These are just some of the youth-related challenges and behaviours that bring parents to HOPE support groups:

• Drug or alcohol abuse
• Mental health issues
• Addiction
• Technology overuse
• Neither working nor going to school
• School-related issues (skipping, suspensions, etc.)
• Legal trouble
• Arriving home late or not at all
• Withdrawal from family and friends
• Verbal or physical abuse
• Stealing money or valuables
• Property destruction or vandalism
• Lying

Do you constantly feel like you are walking on eggshells around your young person? Do you lie on their behalf or cover for them? Are you frightened about what might happen to them? You are not alone if these or similar parenting-related struggles and concerns have:

• Caused you to lose sleep
• Impacted your productivity at work
• Led you to withdraw from friends and family
• Resulted in disagreements between you and your partner
• Left you feeling guilty or inadequate as a parent

HOPE supports parents in working through these challenges and in developing skills that foster resilience and resourcefulness in their young person so that they can prosper as thriving adults.

For Agencies

HOPE makes and receives referrals from agencies, schools, police, and other professionals across Southern Ontario. Referees can rely on HOPE to offer parents with adolescent or young adult children support, information, and resources to enable them to more effectively manage parenting-related challenges.

HOPE support groups improve the quality of life of parents, strengthen families, and foster resourcefulness and resilience in youth. They also help to alleviate the burden placed on our already overstretched community service providers. Parent-to-parent peer support groups enhance parents’ sense of connectedness to the community while empowering them with knowledge, tools, and resources.

Although HOPE does not work directly with youth, our comprehensive approach to familial well-being promotes the development of healthier child-parent relationships by encouraging parents to adopt strengths-focused and future-oriented parenting strategies.

Agencies who work with HOPE often find that parents who attend regularly are more confident in addressing the challenges they face, better equipped to support their young person, and less likely to be overly reliant on their services, freeing up agency capacity.

If you would like to learn more about HOPE, to see your organization added to our referral list, or to arrange for a HOPE representative to speak to your organization, please contact us at info@hope4parents.ca.