Frequently Asked Questions

We offer a ‘First Response’ service to families experiencing Child Against Parent Aggression (CAPA) – which is aggressive behaviour from a child* towards a parent or carer in their family. Some organisations use CAPA to mean “Child or Adolescent to Parent Abuse” but we try to avoid the word “abuse” in our work. 

While we choose not to use the term abuse to describe the actions and impulses of the children in the families we work for, you will find references to Child or Adolescent to Parent Violence and Abuse (CAPVA) on our website so that we are easy to find for families and professionals who need us (because the term CAPVA is the industry standard). However,  we hope by using a less extreme term we are working to lessen the stigma that families experience when asking for help or talking to friends and family members about what they are going through. This blog explains more about why we don’t use the word abuse.

*For us ‘child’ means anyone up to 18, or up 25 years of age for young people diagnosed as neurodivergent.

We offer free and low-cost sessions to make sure everyone can access our services. 

Our family services are offered on a ‘pay what you can’ basis, and we can also offer free services to families who cannot afford to pay for them (with funding primarily from The National Lottery Community Fund). 

Our professional training courses cost from £45 to £85 per person. For more information and pricing about our bespoke training options, please contact us with your requirements.

Capa First Response is an online platform for both families and professionals, We offer our services virtually, so we can support you wherever you are in the world. 

Although we are based in the UK we can offer virtual support worldwide as well as attend training and conferences worldwide.

For family support sessions, you can email us a short summary of what your family is experiencing and we will be in touch. Usually we respond within 3 working days with advice on next steps and current waiting times. Please add info@capafirstresponse.org to your safe-senders list to avoid our response going to your spam folder.

To book a FREE online-drop in session view dates & book on Eventbrite.

For professional training and online networking for professionals, please visit our Eventbrite page or sign up to our newsletter to receive details of future events. 

We can be flexible to meet your needs. We primarily use Zoom for video calls, however we also can use whatsapp video call, or even teams, as well as calling you on the phone.  We want to make it as easy for you and your family as possible!

All our work is bespoke and tailored to meet your own family needs and circumstances. We work collaboratively with families to assess how many sessions are needed – some families have 2-3 sessions others have more. Some families decide they don’t need a one-to-one session and find attending our drop in sessions give them enough support – every family is different but we’ll work with you for the best outcome.

Sadly demand for our services outweighs our capacity, meaning our waiting lists can feel really long. When you are in crisis and reach out to get help the last thing you need is to be told you have to wait for support. We try our very best to offer families an appointment as soon as we can but the wait time can be a few months for one-to-one sessions. This is why we are looking to offer families other ways to feel supported until they can speak with a practitioner, such as our ‘parent and carer drop ins’. 

We would recommend listening to our podcast for some insight and advice whilst you are waiting for your support session, search for ‘The Capa Podcast’ on Spotify, Amazon Music, iTunes etc. 

Yes – we offer support for the whole family.

We believe in order to create healthier relationships between a parent and a child we need to offer support to the WHOLE family, if you feel this is the best solution. That can include siblings, the child using aggressive or violent behaviours, extended family, neighbours… really anyone you feel support you and you family and who you would like included in the support.

All the practitioners that work at Capa have knowledge and experience of supporting families.  For some practitioners this is from years of experience and working with hundreds of families and holding relevant qualifications for others it is lived experience alongside professional experience and knowledge. 

Each practitioner has been hand picked to work with us at Capa, we know how they work and understand their methods. Each practitioner brings a different strength and understanding to the work enabling us to allocate families to a practitioner’s strength. 

We have a practitioner who specialises in working with families where the young person has a neurodivergent diagnosis, as with many more families experiencing this we want to give families the best possible resources to support them in their specific circumstances.

Yes, we accept referrals from any professional working with a family as well as direct referral from family members. We want to collaborate and work with as many people as we can as we believe that the more knowledge we have as a professional the more support we can offer to families. To make a referral please email us.

Yes we do! You can find out about our online training sessions here, as well as see information about bespoke training we can provide which is tailored to your organisation’s specific needs.

For professional training and online networking for professionals, please visit our Eventbrite page or sign up to our newsletter to receive details of future events. 

We are also producing an online training offering for those who cannot attend our live virtual training Keep an eye out on our webpage for more information about how you can access this.

We would love to be the recipient of any fundraising or donation you’d like to make. 

We rely on grants and donations to continue to offer free or low-cost services to families. It costs us £60 to provide a 60 minute session to a family – that’s £1 for every minute we talk to them. This hour can make a huge difference.

Every £30 donated pays for an advice and support session for a family. A donation of £100 can potentially cover all of the sessions a family needs. Just £10 would keep our website up and running for a month.

We would also love to use future funding to:

• Hire and Train more practitioners to join our team so that we can help families faster
• Provide more resources for parents, before, during and after using our services
• Create more online, self-paced training that is CPD certified

You can donate here at Givey and help to spread the word about us with some posters on (print them here) Or you can swim the equivalent of the channel, walk from John o’groats to Lands end or hold a coffee morning to raise funds. For more information, visit our page about ways to support us. 

“The advice you provided has been amazing! The violence has reduced, it has been  life changing., We cant thank you enough”