Meeting places support coping in everyday life – do join us!
In Western Uusimaa, the family centres’ meeting places provide families with children with an open space to meet other parents and receive peer support. This also strengthens the sense of community.
Have you heard of the parish family club? Or have you visited the Mannerheim League for Child Welfare’s (MLL) family café? If yes, then you have visited a family centre’s meeting place.
Meeting place activities have already been a thing in Finland for decades. We can consider the playground activities which started in the late 19th century as the early predecessor of these activities. Parishes and MLL have organised such activities for families with children since the 1950s and 1960s, and the first municipal open day-care centres were opened in the late 1970s. Resident parks are also meeting places.
Every municipality in Western Uusimaa has meeting places for families with children.
- I believe every municipality has a parish family club or a family café run by MLL, says Pia Metsähuone, Project Manager.
There are also a few other organisations and instances that organise meeting place activities, for example the Swedish-language Folkhälsan and the Nice Hearts’ Me-talo in Espoon keskus.
We want to bring the meeting places provided by these and many other organisations under one common name.
- It is easier for families with children when the meeting place activities have one common name. The name ‘family centre’s meeting place’ tells the resident what kind of activities it entails and shows that it meets certain criteria.
The Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare (THL) has created national criteria together with various instances. These criteria define what the meeting place activities should include in order to be good and of high quality.
- Western Uusimaa also adheres to these criteria. All the instances in our area aim to meet the criteria, and they will eventually become a guarantee of quality, says Pia Metsähuone.
Guidance and counselling near families
A meeting place provides company, free socialising and peer support. The meeting place may also provide professional help, guidance and counselling for families.
- There are numerous examples of how various organisations, parishes and various instances in municipalities and Wellbeing Services Counties can bring professional counselling to the meeting places, says Pia Metsähuone.
Professional guidance can entail, for example, that a dentist comes to the meeting place to inform everyone about oral care for children or that a family worker comes to inform everyone about “the terrible twos”, an employee of an organisation comes to talk about depression in mothers or that a nurse of the maternity and child health clinic comes to talk about breastfeeding.
Important preventive action
Based on national surveys, we are already well aware of how meeting place activities affect families and what the preventive effect of such activities is.
Meeting place activities give strength to coping in everyday life, support families in daily life, promote mental well-being and reduce loneliness.
People agreed the most with the following statements in the visitor survey conducted in Vihti.
- “I often go home from the meeting place feeling better than when I went there.”
- “Visiting the meeting place has improved my coping in day-to-day life.”
- “Visiting the meeting place has made me feel that I belong to a group.”
- In addition, almost all the parents said that they have met new people, and the children have made new playmates, Metsähuone says.
- Especially now after the COVID-19 pandemic, it is important for families to come to these meeting places. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many families have come to be who have not even heard of meeting place activities.
How to find the meeting place closest to you? In Western Uusimaa, there are a couple hundred meeting places, although nobody knows the exact number.
Unfortunately, the information on the meeting places is still scattered. You can search for information on the website of your municipality, your local parish and on the websites of MLL’s local associations, for example.
MLL’s association search (in Finnish)(external link)
Parish search (in Finnish)(external link)
On the Lähellä.fi (lahella.fi)(external link) website (in Finnish), you can narrow your search by region and/or locality and also specify your search in other ways (e.g. families with children) Instances that organise meeting place activities must enter their own information to the service. Otherwise, it will not be displayed in the search.