The Essential Parent App – localised for each of our clients – is made to help expectant and new parents bond with their children during the early years and help those children grow into resilient, healthy and independent teenagers and adults.

Essential Parent supports and promotes the factors that help children reach their potential – including good health for them and their parents, attachment, good mental health, responsive feeding, cognitive, physical and emotional development, and much more.

The Essential Parent App offers expert, evidence-based professional written and video content for conception, pregnancy, birth, babies, toddlers, children and teenagers.

Essential Parent is one of the world’s leading online resources for expert-led, evidence-based parental advice.

All our written and video content has been produced following best practice in each field and advised by specialists and bodies such as:

• UNICEF UK Baby Friendly Initiative. (for pregnancy and baby content)
• The St John Ambulance. (for first aid content)
• The Meningitis Research Trust.
• The Child Accident Prevention Trust.
• The National Literacy Trust.

Our original content was developed in association with members of the RCPCH.

Our content is used in UK maternity hospitals, by local authorities’ health teams, Midwives & Health Visitors.

Delivery to parents via the Essential Parent App

Parents register for free on the Essential Parent App and enter their baby’s due date or birth date. From then on, the app delivers content relevant to that stage of their pregnancy or their baby’s life – complementing each Midwifery or Health visiting appointment.

A push notification appears on the app icon each time content arrives for the next appointment. Parents can browse the library content in the app at any time.

For the CLCH Health Visiting App – the content starts in pregnancy and goes up until a child’s 5th birthday.

Founders

Essential Parent was founded by Dr Rebecca Chicot, a Cambridge PhD in Child Development and Parenting, and Diana Hill, an award-winning BBC science documentary film-maker.

As parents, they saw a real need for evidence-based, expertly presented digital baby care content and decided to use their skills to create it in a market where there was limited quality expert content available.