Parenting a young person today can feel both rewarding and overwhelming. As our children grow into teenagers and young adults, their emotional world becomes more complex — and as parents, we all want to support them in the best way possible.
But what does effective support really look like?
At Jigsaw, in collaboration with the University of Limerick, we’re working to answer that question through an exciting new initiative — the PEARL Project.
What is the PEARL Project?
The PEARL project is focused on developing a practical, evidence-informed parenting programme to help strengthen young people’s ability to regulate their emotions — a skill that is critical for mental health, relationships, and resilience.
A key part of this work is ensuring that the programme reflects the real experiences, challenges, and insights of parents and caregivers.
That’s where you come in.
Your Voice Matters
Any parent or caregiver of a young person (aged 12—25 years) is invited to take part in a confidential, 1-hour online discussion.
This is your opportunity to:
Share your experiences of supporting your young person
Talk about what works — and what doesn’t
Help shape a programme that will support families across Ireland
Sessions are flexible and supportive, and you can choose to take part:
One-to-one, or
In a small group discussion
With a dedicated group available for fathers
Why Take Part?
Parenting doesn’t come with a manual — but together, we can create something close.
By taking part, you will:
✅ Help ensure parents’ voices are at the heart of this programme
✅ Contribute to a resource designed to make a real difference in young people’s lives
✅ Support other families facing similar challenges
✅ Be part of a meaningful collaboration between research and real-life experience
Most importantly, your input will help create something practical, relevant, and genuinely useful — not just in theory, but in everyday family life.
A Small Commitment, A Lasting Impact
We know your time is valuable. That’s why participation is simple:
Just 1 hour online
Completely confidential
Scheduled at a time that suits you
That one hour could help shape support that benefits countless young people and families.
Get Involved
If you’re interested in taking part, signing up is easy:
When a young person is struggling, it can show up in ways that are hard to name – snapping over small things, withdrawing, sleeplessness, worry that won’t switch off, or emotions that feel suddenly “too much”. For parents and caregivers, those moments can bring a mix of concern, confusion, and a very human question: What’s the right thing to do here?
That’s the heart of PEARL, a new research project being developed through a partnership between the Univeristy of Limerick and Jigsaw. PEARL is focused on understanding the role emotion regulation can play in supporting positive mental health for young people and the adults who care for them.
What do we mean by “emotion regulation”?
Emotion regulation doesn’t mean never getting upset, or trying to “fix” feelings. It refers to how we notice, make sense of, and respond to emotions, especially when they’re intense. For young people, emotion regulation skills can shape how they cope with stress, conflict, disappointment, and change. For parents and caregivers, emotion regulation also matters because staying present in a difficult moment, even when you’re worried, can help a young person feel safer and less alone.
PEARL’s research focus is simple and important: how can we better support emotion regulation in young people, and how can parents be supported to play a positive role in that process?
A key part of PEARL is its focus on parental engagement, not as an add-on but as a meaningful part of prevention and early support. Many parents want to help, but don’t always have practical tools or guidance that feel relevant to everyday life. PEARL is exploring what support for parents can look like when it’s designed to be accessible, realistic, and grounded in what families are actually experiencing.
Built with families, not just for them
One of the most valuable features of PEARL is its participatory co-design approach. That means the programme won’t be developed in isolation. Instead, it will be shaped with input from:
young people (aged 12–25)
parents/primary caregivers
and professionals working in youth mental health and family support
This approach matters because families aren’t one-size-fits-all. Language, format, and practicality make a huge difference to whether support feels usable—especially when life is already busy or stressful. Co-design helps ensure the programme is meaningful, accessible, and informed by lived experience.
Right now, the research team is running a series of consultations with parents, young people, and professionals to help guide the development of the programme.
A partnership between research and frontline practice
PEARL is being led by PhD researcher Sarah O’Leary in the Department of Psychology at the University of Limerick. The work is supervised primarily by Professor Jennifer McMahon (Head of Department of Psychology, UL), with collaboration from Professor Siobhán Howard (UL). It’s delivered in partnership with Jigsaw, with involvement from Dr Jeff Moore (Research Director, Jigsaw Ireland) and Fiona Hughes (Regional Clinical Manager, Jigsaw Ireland).
This collaboration brings together academic expertise and the reality of frontline youth mental health work—so the research stays connected to what matters in practice.
Every day across Ireland, young people reach out for help with their mental health.
Services like Jigsaw, the National Centre for Youth Mental Health, work to ensure that support is available when it is needed. But as demand continues to grow, services face an important challenge: making sure the right support reaches the right young person at the right time.
A new research project hopes to help with exactly that.
PROACT (Predictive Analytics for Optimised Care in Youth Mental Health) is a partnership between University of Limerick and Jigsaw, funded by the Health Research Board. The project will explore how modern data analysis can help youth mental health services better understand young people’s needs, plan services more effectively, and personalise the support they provide.
Put simply, PROACT is about learning from the information services already collect so that mental health supports can work better for young people.
Why this research matters
Across Ireland and around the world, more young people are seeking help for their mental health. Meeting this need requires services like Jigsaw to keep evolving, not only in how we deliver care, but in how we understand and anticipate it.
PROACT is the first study of its kind in Ireland to examine how advanced analytics can be used within youth mental health services to generate actionable real time insight from real-world service data.
By identifying patterns that are often difficult to detect in day-to-day practice, the project will explore how services can better anticipate demand, understand what works for different young people, and intervene earlier where there is a risk of disengagement.
The ambition is clear – we want to equip clinicians in Jigsaw with better intelligence so that young people can receive more safer, responsive and personalised support.
What the PROACT project will do
The research will focus on five main areas.
Predicting needs and demand
The project will explore how advanced data analysis techniques, including machine learning, can help predict mental health outcomes and identify patterns in how services are used. This could help services anticipate changes in demand, plan staffing more effectively, and respond more quickly when more young people need support.
Understanding young people’s needs
Researchers will analyse anonymised data to build a clearer picture of the needs of young people who access services. This includes looking at how young people find their way to mental health support and how they move through services. Understanding these pathways can help identify gaps in care and groups of young people who may need additional support.
Personalising support
Every young person’s experience of mental health is different. The project will examine how data can help tailor supports to individual needs. Over time, this could help clinicians understand which approaches are most likely to work for particular young people.
Testing tools for clinicians
The research will also explore how data insights could support clinicians in their day-to-day work. In one part of the project, clinicians will test a prototype decision-support tool that uses data insights to help guide personalised care. Their feedback will be essential to make sure any future tools are practical, useful, and aligned with clinical judgement.
Turning research into real-world impact
The final stage of the project will focus on sharing the findings with practitioners, policymakers, and services. The goal is to ensure that what is learned through the research can help improve youth mental health support across Ireland.
Dr Jeff Moore, Director of Research at Jigsaw said:
“At Jigsaw, we have made major investments in implementing a world-class electronic health record system because we believe better data leads to safe and more effective mental health care. PROACT allows us to combine that asset with world-class academic and clinical expertise to apply innovative analytic methods in a way that is grounded in real service need. This is about turning data into intelligence that supports clinicians, informs better decisions and helps deliver safer, personalised and effective care for young people.”
Protecting young people’s privacy
Protecting the privacy of young people is central to this project. All of the data used in the research will be fully anonymised. This means individual young people cannot be identified.
The aim is not to monitor individuals. Instead, the research looks at patterns across many cases so services can learn and improve over time.
A collaboration across disciplines
PROACT brings together people with expertise in mental health research, clinical practice, artificial intelligence, policy, and lived experience.
The research team includes Dr Ruth Melia, Associate Professor in Clinical Psychology at University of Limerick, Dr Jeff Moore, Director of Research at Jigsaw – The National Centre for Youth Mental Health, and Professor Pepijn Van de Ven, Professor of AI and Machine Learning at University of Limerick.
They are joined by Derek Chambers General Manager (Policy Implementation) at the National Mental Health Office, in HSE Access & Integration team along with youth advocates Jack Kirby and Eva Lenihan, who help ensure the voices and perspectives of young people remain central to the work.
Looking ahead
The long-term vision of the PROACT project is straightforward. It is about helping youth mental health services provide the right support the first time a young person seeks help.
By learning from data in a responsible way, the research aims to help services anticipate demand, reduce waiting times, identify young people who may need additional support, and plan services more effectively.
Ultimately, the goal is simple. When a young person reaches out for help, they should receive the support they need as quickly and effectively as possible.
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