About us

Essential Parent’s ambition

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.

Early Years intervention is essential to improve the life chances of children, especially those from less affluent communities.

How Essential Parent is achieving its ambition

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

Essential Parent is a digital information service offering expert, evidence-based professional written and video content for conception, pregnancy, birth, babies, toddlers, children and teenagers.

We are one of the world’s leading online resources for expert-led, evidence-based parental advice. Our original content was developed in association with members of the Royal College of Paediatricians and Child Health and our pregnancy and baby content follows expert advice from the UNICEF UK Baby Friendly Initiative.

Health professionals can use our “e-care” software to deliver selected EP content online to parents.

Why use Essential Parent?
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All our content has been produced following best practice in each field and advised by specialists such as IVF pioneer Professor Robert Winston 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 over 100 UK maternity hospitals, by NCT teachers up and down the country, in local authority children’s centres, and by Midwives, Health Visitors and GPs.

EP supports the NCT classes, Barnardo’s, the Daisy Foundation and the Genesis Research Trust.

Our aim is to offer you free access to the very best information available.

Our platform
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Our platform is designed to help you, or the parents you work with, navigate the challenges of parenthood so that you can give children the best chances in life.

The platform offers expert presented how-to video, FAQ videos and evidence-based videos and articles written for parents and parents to be.

The EP Team

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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.

Chairman

Adrian Downing has 25 years commercial experience gained in healthcare, management consulting and financial services sectors. Expertise in strategy development and operational implementation combined with experience of Executive and Non-Executive Board roles. Adrian has strong relationship skills to help manage complex change with a focus on improving operational delivery. He has a postgraduate degree in healthcare outcomes and systems. Adrian provides mentoring and advisory support on a number of healthcare initiatives including the NHS Innovation Accelerator programme.

Essential Parent‘s productions include a set of parenting books published through Quadrille, and an award-winning app.

Essential Parent Company DVDs went into production during 2012 (translated into Urdu, Arabic and simple English) and were then launched with John Lewis before being taken to other retailers including Tesco.

In 2015, all EP content became digital. In 2017, the e-care delivery system was built so health professionals could deliver specially chosen content to parents on their smartphones.