Good evening, everyone. It's wonderful to have this chance to talk briefly about some of my work on parenting interventions over the years. I've divided this work into three chapters, but obviously they all overlap and interact with each other. So chapter 1, where did it all start? Early observational studies of parenting and conduct problems. Now, for my entire career, I've worked on parenting interventions, and this was a passion that began when I was a psychology undergraduate, volunteering in the Park Hospital for Children in Oxford. And we were dealing with children who had very intense outbursts of aggression. And I became interested in how aggression and behaviour problems can be sparked off by-- and then become embedded in the social interactions that are happening around the child in a family or care setting or a peer group. And then how interventions might help to prevent or reverse these unhelpful interactions. This led me into doctoral work where I became engrossed in the brilliant work of Gerald Patterson at Oregon Social Learning Centre. Arguably, he's had the biggest influence on understanding the factors that promote both child-problem behaviour and harsh parenting in the family. And then, very carefully, he was testing how these might be ameliorated through parenting interventions. It was vital to this PhD work to find Kathy Silver as a supervisor. She taught me to think, to use rigorous observational methods, and to develop my ideas about adults positive influences on children. This led to a series of studies testing Patterson's theories on the social learning of conduct problems, but extending his work towards developmental processes that might be more important for younger children, particularly positive processes in the family. The first paper from this work does seem a long time ago, now. Ask the question is the training for harmony as well as for fighting in the family? Obviously, yes, we might say, but in the conduct problem field feel then, all the focus was on coercive cycles. And these observational studies identified positive processes that appeared to influence the development of conduct problems. So helping affirm the need for interventions that focused on for example, relationship building through play, and components that are now standard in most effective parenting interventions. So this might seem obvious, but I'll add a critical postscript here as well. The obvious isn't always right. Just fast forwarding for a moment to a different chapter, our recent work asking what are the essential components of parenting interventions using network meta analysis. It seems that adding extra components such as relationship building doesn't necessarily improve outcomes for children, but it's quite nuanced picture. It may depend on the level of conduct problems, but generally, it seems that less is more in the case of parenting interventions. Second chapter, testing and understanding parenting interventions for conduct problems: How well, where and for whom do they work. So the obvious next way to go was to work on actual interventions. So I trained as a clinical psychologist at the Maudsley, worked in community services for children with disabilities in Camberwell, with a particular focus on working with families in the home around their children's behavioural difficulties. Working in the North Peckham Estate in the 1980s was quite an incredible education. There was such diversity of families, and to observe the very different ways that people dealt with incredibly needy children, and on top of everything else in their lives was quite extraordinary. After seven years of clinical work, I turned to researching parenting programmes. In the late '90s, I got to know and collaborate with Stephen Scott and Judy Hutchings, from whom I've learned a huge amount about research and practise. This led to conducting a randomised trial of a parenting intervention in the voluntary sector for children with conduct problems. These interventions have typically been developed-- typically delivered in specialist health services by psychologists and others, and this trial was the first to show that these interventions could be implemented in a small NGO with non-clinical staff and get the same results as in trials in specialist services. The programmes appeared to work through the same positive-parenting mechanisms, and this was important in that the voluntary sector was at the time becoming an important setting for the delivery of parenting interventions, often in services commissioned by government but delivered in the third sector. Then became very interested not only in the main effects of these interventions, but how we could explain the heterogeneity of their effects. So evidence-based parenting programmes in my memory began to interest policymakers in the UK around 2004-- started with the home office and quickly moved to health and schools and families. And it culminated in Stephen Scott's National Academy of parenting practitioners, which in my view is a brilliant vision of how to implement effective parenting programmes at wider scale, whilst giving services choices about what was most feasible in their context. But before we got to this point, our advocating for evidence-based parenting intervention raise many questions amongst stakeholders, and clearly good data was needed to answer these. And these questions raised, critical ones, often inspired a lot of my research from then on. So we had questions like, surely these are middle class models of parenting, and they won't work with the families in our services. And similar conclusions were coming from large meta analyses at the time, supporting this view that parenting interventions were less effective with low-income families. This didn't seem very likely to us in anyway, what were we all doing in Peckham in that case? So what happens if we use more rigorous designs to test this question, like pooling individual-level data rather than doing crude-aggregate meta analysis? By looking across lots of different studies, then we represent different populations and service types and the UK context as well. So with the help of Stephen Scott and Patty Leijten from Amsterdam, we set out to pull data from all the randomised trials of one common intervention-- the incredible years all over Europe. We had up to 1,800 families in these analyses. So much more power to test questions about what works for whom-- that is moderator questions. So what did we find? Well, in this study, we found no moderation by family, poverty, by being a teenage parent or a lone parent. So these parenting interventions work just as well for these socially disadvantaged groups as for other families. And importantly, 30% of the children in the study came from an ethnic minority, and those families and children benefited just as much from the interventions, despite none of the interventions being specifically adapted for those groups. So what are the questions were we asked? Well, one was, well, we don't want American programmes here. Surely they won't work here because we're different-- our culture is different. This was beginning to look like this wasn't the case from the trials that were happening in the UK at the time of American interventions, but we wanted to test the principle of whether parenting interventions transport well across countries or not. And to do this, we did a large meta analysis. And in this meta analysis, we found no differential effects, depending on whether the interventions are being developed in the country, where they were being tested or whether they've been imported from another country. And we replicated this in another large meta-analysis of trials in low-and middle-income countries. What about clinical and developmental characteristics as moderators of parenting intervention effects? We got asked questions like, surely these interventions won't work with depressed parents because they won't want to sit-in a group and discuss their family life. Their depression surely needs treating first before they can benefit from a parenting programme. This sounds very plausible, but our data didn't bear this out. And also what about children with the most severe conduct problems? Won't they need something more than a parenting intervention in a group? Now for both-- in this large data set, both the parent depression and conduct-problem severity, we got a moderation effect. But in the other direction for both these problems, families benefited more in terms of the child-conduct problems when they had more severe depression or more severe conduct problems at the start, and this held for all levels of depression and conduct problems. We're now seeing if this replicates in larger and more diverse samples of different kinds of interventions, because it may be that there's more nuance about whether there's a sweet spot at which the interventions start to work better or less well. What about the developmental stage of the children? There's a large literature from neuroscience and economics, including Heckmans famous curve, saying that interventions in the early years are more effective than later ones and more cost effective. But we found no evidence to support this from parenting interventions using our pooled data set, and cost effectiveness even increased with age in a subset of trials from the UK. So Heckmans curve doesn't seem to work very well for one common intervention-- parenting for behavioural problems. We also replicated this because people didn't really seem to always believe it-- using an aggregate level meta analysis across 150 different trials. But also more recently, we've expanded our pooled data set so that it wasn't just about the incredible years, but about other interventions across Europe, and again found the same lack of any age effect in parenting interventions for conduct problems. So I think that together, these findings present a pretty hopeful picture of how parenting interventions can be effective across different age groups, across different and diverse populations and countries, different service session settings, and different levels of clinical need. And particularly the work on transportability, set the stage for our team thinking about how we might be able to help with problems that are widespread across the majority world. So this brings me to the third chapter about parenting evidence around the world. Now, we started in about 2010 working with WHO and their violence prevention unit. They were concerned about levels of violence against children in the world. And they are quite shocking, 1 out of 2 children suffer from some form of violence each year, and nearly 3 in 4 very young children regularly suffer physical punishment or emotional violence from their parents or caregivers. So WHO is partly coming from a public health perspective about the huge costs and burdens of violence to society. But other actors, such as UNICEF, came more from a children's-rights perspective. But all these different reasons for reducing violence against children came together to advocate for reducing violence against children and getting this enshrined in the sustainable development goals. WHO then at this time became very interested in how evidence-based parenting interventions might be one of the key solutions for preventing violence against children in the family. The theories that we already had about the factors in the family that maintain children's conduct problems would also predict that the same interventions are effective for reducing physical and emotional maltreatment of children in the family. And this was borne out at the time by a few trials in high income families with parents identified for maltreatment. So although my interests have been in preventing and treating conduct problems, we had the chance to make a difference to a larger scale by responding to this growing global-policy interest in interventions for preventing violence in the family. So working with WHO, we developed parenting for lifelong health in South Africa, a social learning theory-based parenting programme using similar components to the many other social learning theory programmes. But importantly, we wanted one that was low cost, open source, and easily adaptable to local cultures. We did a randomised trial of this intervention in South Africa led by Professor Cathy Ward. We were very proud that it got an ACAMH best paper award in 2021. And this grew into the global-parenting initiative, led by Professor Jamie Lachman in Oxford, with funding from LEGO and others, and the aim of this was to work out how to make programmes more accessible in low-and middle-income countries. This includes using new digital solutions combined with in-person delivery. And this involves then co-creation of interventions and adaptations, working with governments, and especially working within systems to focus on scale from the outset. And testing not only what works, but what components are most feasible and effective in those settings. Some examples of the projects that we're doing within different systems in these countries are: Parenting in Malaysia's Government Preschool System and investigating components with factorial trials; the work of Amanda Sim on the Thai-Myanmar border. The refugees in this area wanted to get together as a community and watch a film about parenting, so they developed a beautiful drama about film, which I hope is going to be open access quite soon for people to see. And a cluster randomised trial of this showed significant effects on violence against children-- you can find that published in The Lancet Regional Health. In the Philippines, the government chose to implement parenting programmes in the conditional cash transfer system at scale, whereas in Thailand they chose the primary health care system with nurses and other health professionals implementing the programme. And then finally, I come to the WHO guidelines on parenting interventions. I think this was possibly the most amazing moment in my career. This was the moment when WHO contacted us because they wanted there to actually be a global guideline on evidence based parenting programmes to influence policy makers all over the world. And they asked us to put together all the evidence for this, putting it through their rigorous systematic review and guideline process. And they wanted us to not only to ask effectiveness questions based on randomised trials, but also that all the other questions that matter to a policy maker or a practitioner beyond what works. And this is their integrate system asking questions about the feasibility, the equity effects, the benefits and harms, the social effect of acceptability, and the cost and cost effectiveness of programmes. So we did about 12 different reviews addressing all these different questions. There's an amazing amount of evidence about parenting interventions across the world now, and each of these countries in green-- in each of these countries, there have been randomised trials of parenting interventions. And this culminated in a WHO guideline after a long and thoughtful process where WHO now recommends parenting interventions across the world to all parents who might need or want them as being effective for preventing and reducing physical and emotional violence against children, child emotional and behavioural problems, and parent depressive symptoms. This huge synthesis was a key step towards WHO then organising a global advocacy meeting last year in Bogota in Colombia. And they managed to get ministers from over 100 countries to turn up and listen, and then to pledge to implement policies to end violence against children in their countries. How much that turns into reality obviously remains to be seen. Now, many teams have done this research all over the world, as you can see, and ours is just one contribution. But together we've clearly made a difference to policy and hopefully to lives on the ground. Thank you.