United Future's specific policies to support families are:

1. Supporting Parenting:
   
   
   • Increase support to voluntary agencies providing parenting education and relationship counselling programmes.
   • Give the Families Commission responsibility for co-ordinating and promoting parenting education programmes, as well as initiating public education campaigns promoting parenting skills.
   • Establish Family Support Co-ordinators to visit all expecting parents and ensure they access the services they need provided by government and voluntary agencies (e.g. parenting education, relationship counselling, budget advice, early childhood health and education services).
   • Develop Family Support Centres as "one stop shops", bringing together these key family services.
   • Fund Plunket to ensure that every child receives the recommended eight well child health checks in the first five years.
   • Engage parents in their children's education from the very beginning, by expanding programmes such as Parents As First Teachers to include all new families, and by offering more support to playcentres.
   • Promote a change in attitudes so that seeking advice and help when it is needed is seen not as a failure, but the action of concerned and responsible family members.
   • Ensure that grandparents raising grandchildren have access to the same financial assistance as natural parents or foster parents.
   • Clarify the law with regard to the physical discipline of children.
   • Promote a range of options for employers to implement that would help their employees maintain a healthy work/life balance, such as flexible working hours, and access to childcare facilities, through mechanisms such as subsidies. This will also serve to give practical effect to attracting overseas workers due to the Kiwi lifestyle.
   • Establish a contestable fund for projects that make public places more child and family friendly.
   • Ensure that television programmes and computer games either targeted at children or able to be readily accessed by them are appropriately classified.
   • Establish a secondary school subject called 'Life Skills', which has a curriculum that includes segments on parenting skills, as well as career planning, health, sexuality and relationships, drugs, budgeting advice, civics education, and driver education.
   
   
   
2. Supporting Marriage and Relationships:
   
   
   • Establish Family Relationship Centres linked to the Family Court, providing a single point of contact for parents to access information, advice, and referrals to relationship counseling. The network of centres will also be supported by a free telephone advice line.
   • Provide information and referral to pre-marriage education services through the Family Relationship Centres.
   • Ensure that all families involved in custody, access and guardianship cases have the opportunity to participate in mediation first through the Family Relationship Centres, to help them develop their own solutions in relation to their children's care, to resolve disputes faster, and to provide for the participation of children in the decision-making process.
   • Ensure that all families that do participate in Family Court hearings undergo a parenting education programme beforehand to minimise the impact of proceedings on children.
   • Make the Family Relationships Centres the first point of contact where disagreements arise between separated parents over parenting orders, in an attempt to resolve the issue without involving the courts.
   
   
   
3. Supporting at-risk families:
   
   
   • Restructure the Department of Child, Youth and Family (CYF) by establishing a "Dual Track Intake" process that differentiates critical child protection concerns from broader family support needs. The most serious cases of abuse and neglect will be dealt with by a new Child Protection Agency working much more closely with the police. Family Support Service Co-ordinators will focus on preventing lower criticality cases of neglect and abuse from becoming more serious by helping families to access services they need.
   • Require the Child Protection Agency to follow up on the home life of all those arrested for violent crimes, to investigate whether any children may be at risk, and ensure that the Police refer any criminal activity that involves children to the CPA.
   
   
   
4. Supporting children through reform of the child support system:
   
   
   • Ensure that the child support system better recognises shared parenting arrangements.
   • Ensure that child support payments are made directly to DPB recipients, and that their benefit is reduced by the appropriate amount, to attach greater significance to liable parent contributions.
   • Allow the state to apply for child support if the sole parent on the DPB refuses.
   • Allow contributions towards overdue child support payments to be deducted from the liable parent's pay or benefit, and do not allow them to leave the country with debt outstanding.
   • Increase the minimum child support payment from the current $12.75 per week, to better reflect the costs of raising a child.
   • Task the Families Commission to investigate how government policy affects step-families.

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