Grant: Master's Award: Canada Graduate Research Scholarships - Master's program

Parenting programs offer strategies to strengthen caregiving skills, improve child outcomes, and reduce the risk of child maltreatment. Despite this, many parents face barriers that prevent them from benefiting from these supports. Parents with complex needs often require flexible, holistic, and family-centred services. However, the services available to families are spread across multiple disconnected ministries and organizations. This forces parents to navigate uncoordinated services, unclear referral pathways, and logistical barriers that make it difficult to address their needs and fully engage in parenting programs. There remains a critical need to understand how system navigation barriers shape parents’ capacity to benefit from existing parenting programs. This study will explore how these barriers impact parents' caregiving capacity and children’s emotional and behavioural outcomes. Specifically, it aims to understand parents’ experiences navigating disconnected systems, identify service barriers, and examine how unmet needs influence parenting capacity and child outcomes. Parents of children ages 2-6 who are receiving parenting services from community organizations and child mental health agencies will be recruited. Parents will complete surveys on demographic background, service use, system navigation, parenting capacity, and child emotional and behavioural functioning. Parents will also be invited to participate in interviews to provide deeper insight into their experiences. This study will advance our understanding of how disconnected service systems impact parenting capacity and child outcomes. This knowledge can help inform system-level changes and guide the development of more coordinated, accessible, and holistic family-centred service pathways.