July 2024
Solutions to perinatal loneliness
This report shares the findings from the Perinatal Loneliness Project through easy-to-read mind maps. It explores: how parents experience loneliness, what practitioners can do about it, what support families want and what families want policymakers to change
The UK Government Loneliness Strategy identified tackling loneliness amongst new parents as a priority in 2022. This research project aimed to address a gap in the research to identify potential solutions to perinatal loneliness.
Three types of loneliness were utilised throughout this project. Social loneliness is when a parent lacks a fulfilling social network, and emotional loneliness is when parents lack people to confide in. Existential loneliness is where a person feels disconnected from other people, or meaningless and lacking purpose.
I thought hard about how best to share my research findings so they can be used quickly by policy-makers, practitioners, services, and other researchers to have a timely impact. These mind-maps share an overview of the key findings. Behind these mind-map sits rigorous and careful work: talking to participants, analysing the data, exploring common themes, checking the ideas with lived experience experts, academics and professionals, and implementing the feedback.
I hope these mind maps will help others to understand the broad issues, and spark new thoughts, ideas, projects and research. They will evolve over time, in response to feedback and discussion and further research. If you want more information about any of these mind-maps, please contact me on ruth.naughton-doe@york.ac.uk