Date: February 2026
Authors: Lee, L., Winstanley, S., Ikuta, M., Blackstaffe, A., Wells, L.
Parents and caregivers play a vital role in shaping their children’s understanding of healthy and respectful relationships. In fact, they are the role models and everyday influencers through which young people learn what care, respect, and safety look like in practice.
Understanding this, ConnectED Parents came about as an innovative, technology-enabled intervention designed to support parents and caregivers in preventing adolescent dating violence by promoting healthy youth relationships.
Through a light-touch approach, the program delivers practical, research-backed parenting and healthy relationship tips and resources directly to parents’ phones, seamlessly integrating into everyday routines. Together with peer support spaces for parents, ConnectED Parents is also helping to build networks of support and healthy environments for parents and caregivers.
Our new report, “ConnectED Parents: A Technology-Enabled Approach to Prevent Adolescent Dating Violence”, plots the lessons learned and recommendations for service providers working in adolescent dating violence prevention and related fields.
Between 2021 and 2025, Shift: The Project to End Domestic Violence adapted, implemented, and evaluated ConnectED Parents, including in the following areas:
- Service providers’ capacity to create and strengthen healthy social environments in parent settings that reinforce healthy relationship behaviours.
- Parent leaders’ capacity to provide peer support that promotes healthy youth relationships.
- Parents’ competencies to initiate and sustain conversations with their children about healthy relationships and adolescent dating violence prevention.
Our new publication demonstrates the importance of sustained funding and support for innovation in the violence prevention sector, particularly technology-enabled approaches that can be scaled, adapted, and embedded within existing community systems.
This commitment to early, skills-first, and technology-enabled approaches strengthens families, shapes community and gender norms, prevents harm before violence occurs, and builds safer futures for youth.
Read the full report here.
Key Quotes
- “Skills-first approaches engage parents early, support quick wins, and build habits for lasting change. We’re grateful that ConnectED Parents has had such an impact on parents’ and caregivers’ ability to help stop violence before it starts.” – Lianne Lee, Project Manager, ConnectED Parents
- “I had previously been through dating violence with my daughter, but had no idea how to handle everything. Between that experience and the resources ConnectED Parents shared, I’m now much better prepared for when my son starts dating.” – Parent Participant
Quick Facts
- ConnectED Parents was designed using the Behavioural Drivers’ Model, a comprehensive framework that synthesizes 25 evidence-based behavioural and decision-making theories.
- ConnectED Parents targets 3 key drivers that influence parents’ behaviours around having healthy relationship conversations with their children: social environment (the culture and norms within parents’ everyday settings), social influence (the impact of peer and social networks), and individual psychology (knowledge, beliefs, and personal motivations).
- ConnectED Parents’ text message microlearning approach set a new standard for parent engagement. 97% of parents agreed that text messaging was a useful tool for learning about healthy youth relationships (up from 55% before the intervention), reporting that messages fit seamlessly into busy lives.
- ConnectED Parents achieved an 83% retention rate across its 6-month program, exceeding typical parent-focused interventions of 40-60%.
Associated Resources
