About Us
Partners in Parenting (PiP) aims to bridge the gap between complex research evidence and practical resources for parents.
We know that parents play an important role in protecting their child’s mental wellbeing. However, despite extensive research supporting the role parents can play in reducing their teen’s risk of mental health problems, until recently this information was not easily accessible to parents.
PiP brings together decades of high-quality research evidence and the consensus of international experts on parenting and youth mental health. Parents can access this information via an interactive, online program, designed to build skills and confidence in ways that may protect their teen from depression and anxiety disorders.
To date, we’ve conducted three large research trials with over 5000 Australian parents. Our results show that PiP is effective, with benefits for both parents and teens.
If you’d like to read more about the research behind PiP, click here for a summary of published papers, or get in touch with us at [email protected].
We are a team of researchers at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. We are passionate about supporting parents and improving the mental wellbeing of young people.
Our latest program, PiP+, is made possible through a partnership between the Parenting and Youth Mental Health Group, Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health, and Action Lab, Faculty of Information Technology. Together, we have redesigned PiP to improve parents’ experience and support while completing PiP.
We’ve also partnered with Prevention United to deliver the program to families across Australia.
Lead Researcher & Founder of Partners in Parenting
Marie is an Associate Professor, Psychologist and Head of the Parenting and Youth Mental Health Group at Monash University. Marie has been recognised as a leading international expert in parent-child relationships.
Development and Evaluation
Mairead is a Psychologist and Research Fellow in the Parenting and Youth Mental Health Research Group at Monash University. Mairead has been instrumental in the development and evaluation of the Partners in Parenting program.
Action Lab is a multidisciplinary team of impact-focused researchers in the department of Human-Centred Computing at Monash University, Australia. They recently joined the PiP team to co-design and develop PiP+ (the new and updated version of PiP), with the latest technology and their domain expertise in computer science, human-centred design methods, interaction design and digital mental health.
Over the past five years, the Action Lab project team has been led by Professor Patrick Olivier, bringing together expertise across co-design, system architecture, UI/UX, and research engineering. Co-design has been led by Dr Ling Wu, while Dr Jue (Grace) Xie serves as System Architect of the INDUK platform underpinning multiple PiP deployments and as Technical Lead across diverse PiP implementations. Current UI/UX design contributions are led by Dhruv Basur and Yusun Jeon, with lead research engineering support from Chris Prawira, Kent Man, Nizomjon Khajiev, and Joshua Ee. We also acknowledge the contributions of Action Lab members external to Monash University, including A/Prof. Tom Bartindale and A/Prof. Roisin McNaney, as well as former Action Lab members Communication Designer Joshua Seguin and Research Engineer Peter Chen.
The PiP+ program and research project are part of a collaboration involving: Emeritus Professor Tony Jorm (University of Melbourne); Dr Stephen Carbone (Prevention United); Associate Professor Sarah Whittle (University of Melbourne); Dr Orli Schwartz (University of Melbourne); Professor Nicholas Allen (University of Oregon); Gail McHardy (Parents Victoria); Associate Professor Glenn Melvin (Deakin University); Professor Andrew Thompson (University of Melbourne, Orygen Youth Health, University of Warwick); Dr Catherine Wade (Parenting Research Centre); and Dr Steven Leicester (headspace).
The PiP+ program was delivered in collaboration with our industry partners Prevention United, who supported the implementation of PiP from 2020 to 2022.
The Partners in Parenting program is part of a suite of parenting resources from the Parenting Strategies Program, which was first established in 2010. Throughout its 10-year history, the program has had many contributors and funders, whom we cannot all acknowledge by name here. Nonetheless, special thanks go to the following contributors to the Partners in Parenting program: Professor Tony Jorm (University of Melbourne), Dr Katherine Lawrence (Monash University), Professor Ron Rapee (Macquarie University), Associate Professor Glenn Melvin (Deakin University), Jacqueline Green, Clare Nowell (Monash University), and all the staff, students, and volunteers of the Parenting and Youth Mental Health Group from 2014 to 2021.
We also thank the parents and young people who have contributed feedback throughout the different stages of the PiP journey.
We acknowledge with thanks the funding which have supported the development and evaluation of the program from 2011–2021, including: National Health and Medical Research Council (APP IDs 2005621, 566652, 1061744, 400001), Australian Rotary Health, Monash University, and Helen Macpherson Smith Trust.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
