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Supporting parents of children with mental health challenges to be their child's best advocate
Refer a Parent to Us
If you're working with a child and want to better support their parent, you don’t have to do it alone.
Maybe you're seeing progress in sessions, but the parent feels unsure what to do at home. Maybe systems like school or services are creating stress outside of your work together.
Or maybe you know the parent needs someone to talk to, someone who understands what it’s like to be in their shoes.
Download our brochure to share with families. While you focus on the child, we’ll work one-on-one with the parent, helping them navigate, problem-solve, and feel more confident every step of the way.
Bring Parent Peer Support to Your Community
If you're serving families who are struggling to navigate services, a Parent Peer can build trust and connection in ways traditional systems sometimes cannot.
We can tailor Parent Peer support to meet the needs of your community, including:
In-person support in your area
Virtual support for rural or geographically spread communities
A combination of both
The Parent Alliance recruits, trains, and supervises Parent Peers so your organization gains family support capacity without needing to build a program from scratch.
Offer Parenting Classes for the Families You Serve
Contract with us to offer sessions from our existing parenting classes, and we’ll handle the logistics. Families will receive access codes to register, and your agency is billed based on the number of sessions delivered.
What makes these classes different is how they were designed.
Our parenting classes are developed by a professional curriculum designer with expertise in adult learning, ensuring that the material is evidence based, practical, engaging, and easy for parents to apply in real life.
Classes focus on situations most traditional parenting classes don’t address the specific strategies helpful when raising children whose behavioral or emotional challenges mean that typical parenting advice doesn’t always work the way it’s expected to.
Classes also focus on an age group that is often overlooked in parenting programs - pre-teens, teenagers, and young adults.
Parents walk away with strategies they can use right away. The goal is for parents to be able to put what they learn tonight into practice tomorrow.
Each class includes:
Ashort knowledge check so parents can confirm they understand the key concepts
A summary letter outlining the concepts covered, which can be helpful for documentation when needed
A certificate of completion for the class
Downloadable worksheets parents can keep and use later
Classes are designed to be flexible and accessible, allowing parents to participate when their schedules allow.
And learning doesn’t stop when the class ends. After completing a class, parents can reach out to a Parent Peer for additional guidance, practice, and troubleshooting as they begin applying the strategies at home.
If you're exploring ways to provide meaningful parent education to the families connected to your organization, we’d be happy to talk about how these classes could fit into your community. And if our current offerings don’t meet your needs we’re happy to discuss classes specific for you audience.
Support for Foster, Kinship, and Adoptive Families
Many agencies serve families caring for children through foster care, kinship arrangements, or adoption.
These caregivers often face unique challenges while supporting children who may be navigating behavioral or emotional struggles.
The Parent Alliance offers trainings and parent education designed specifically for these families, helping caregivers better understand what children may be experiencing and how to navigate the systems surrounding them.
Training for Your Staff
Sometimes the most helpful thing for families is when systems understand the parent perspective more deeply.
The Parent Alliance provides professional trainings that help staff better understand what parents are experiencing and how to work alongside them more effectively.
Trainings can be customized to meet the needs of your team, organization, or community.
Conference and Event Presentations
If you're planning a conference, summit, or community event and want to bring the parent perspective into the room, our team regularly presents across Pennsylvania.
Our presentations combine professional knowledge with lived experience, helping audiences better understand the realities families face while navigating complex systems.
The Difference a Parent Peer Can Make
You may already have staff who help families navigate services. Many systems today use roles like family navigators, care coordinators, or case managers. Those roles can be incredibly valuable. What makes Parent Peers different is lived experience. Every Parent Peer on our team is a parent who has raised or is raising a child whose behavioral or mental health challenges affect daily life - at home, at school, and across the systems families rely on for support. Parent Peers know what it feels like to sit on the parent side of the table. We know the feeling in the pit of your stomach when a meeting isn’t going well. We know what it’s like to feel judged or misunderstood when you’re trying to do everything you can for your child. We know what it’s like to lie awake at night worrying, night after night, and still get up the next morning to go to work and care for your family as if everything is fine. Some members of our team previously worked in education, social services, or other helping professions before their own children began struggling. Experiencing those same systems as parents gave them a completely different perspective. The understanding that comes from living this life can’t be taught in a training or gained simply through professional experience. Because of that, Parent Peers often build trust with families very quickly. Parents recognize that the person sitting across from them understands their reality in a deeply personal way. For organizations, that trust can make a meaningful difference. When parents feel understood, they are often more willing to engage with services and work collaboratively with professionals.
Why Organizations Partner With Us
The PA Parent and Family Alliance is a statewide program of Allegheny Family Network and has connected with families in all 67 counties across Pennsylvania.
Our team lives in communities across the state, including places where services are abundant and others where families may have limited options.
Because our team members are parents who have navigated these systems ourselves, we often help build trust between families and professionals in ways that traditional approaches sometimes struggle to achieve.
