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Thoughts on Good-Enough Parenting Martin Price Cardiff School of Social Sciences.

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1 Thoughts on Good-Enough Parenting Martin Price Cardiff School of Social Sciences

2 Research Hypothesis Social worker’s assessments of neglected children’s needs, and their professional judgements about the provision of services and interventions required to meet those needs, are informed, shaped and triggered by a complex mix of personal, organisational and external influences and pressures.

3 Emerging Themes Practitioners make decisions across a continuum of ideas about good-enough parenting at one end, and the evidencing the case for Family Court orders at the other. Whilst parents need and are given chances to put it right, children’s timelines press the case for making judgements about intervening. Enough’s enough – it’s much more than a professional hunch and always a judgement individual to each case

4 Good Enough Parenting: a re-occurring concept Interviewees often made reference to ‘good-enough parenting’ Good-enough parenting was linked to ‘threshold or thresholds’

5 Good Enough Parenting: Practitioners Perspectives “ There’s this emphasis on good-enough. It’s a difficult one because ‘good enough’ for who really. Would it be good enough for my family or if I had children; probably not really, but that not the kind of bench mark we work to. It’s something that I struggle with then. But that’s reality of it because otherwise we’d probably be overwhelmed as a service...”

6 Good Enough Parenting: Practitioners Perspectives “Other agencies compare thresholds to what they feel is acceptable in their own homes. We compare thresholds and good enough to what we consider is good enough. There is no general template for what is good enough”

7 Good Enough Parenting: Perspective from the Literature Winnicott (1953): the good enough mother (not necessarily the infant's own mother) is the “one who makes active adaptation to the infant's needs, an active adaptation that gradually lessens, according to the infant's growing ability to account for failure of adaptation and to tolerate the results of frustration”. Winnicott (1964): described normal parents “who are likely to achieve and maintain a family of ordinary healthy children” and supported their right to be heard as having specialist knowledge about their children

8 Good Enough Parenting: Perspective from the Literature Bettelheim (1987) on the outcome of successful parenting: “...the raising of a child who may not necessarily become a success in the eyes of the world, but who on reflection would be well pleased with the way he was raised and who would decide that by and large he is satisfied with himself, despite all the shortcomings to which we are all prey”.... adding to the mix: the abilities to cope with the vicissitudes of life and to form lasting and intimate relationships with others.

9 Good Enough Parenting: Seeing Other Professionals’ Perspectives “ I will go out and check it and would say I understand your concerns about the home conditions however they are considered good enough.” “It’s not necessarily down to different agencies, it’s more individual. So certain health visitors for example would be raising concerns about neglect whilst other might see it as good enough.” “... different agencies and professionals have different perceptions of what neglect is and what’s good enough really”.

10 Parenting: A Judge’s Perspectives “...society must be willing to tolerate very diverse standards of parenting including the eccentric, the barely adequate and the inconsistent. It follows too that children will inevitably have both very different experiences of parenting and very unequal consequences flowing from it... These are the consequences of our fallible humanity and it is not the provenance of the state to spare children all the consequences of defective parenting. In any event, it simply could not be done”. (Hedley J, quoted in Mumby “In the matter of A (A child) NCN [2015]EWFC11)”

11 Good Enough Parenting: Practitioner’s Perspective “ what matters is what the child’s experience is, and if that child is not experiencing an adequate life and home conditions and experience, then that’s not good enough”

12 Good Enough Parenting: Guidance and Statute No reference to good enough parenting in the Children Act 1989; Safeguarding Children: Working Together Under the Children Act 2004; or in the Social Services and Wellbeing Act 2014 Similarly absent from the Framework for Assessment in Need and their Families – but it does set out minimum requirements and different dimensions of parenting (Jones 2001) Tools like the Graded Care Profile provide an organised approach to comparing parenting qualities (Srivastava and Polnay 1997; Barlow et al 2012; Sen et al, 2014)

13 Good Enough Parenting: some thoughts The social work concept of ‘good-enough parenting’ is a judgement made by practitioners and managers working within organisational, social legal and political constructs. There are at least two axes in which differing views or thresholds may be located professional/political and the relational proximity of the child Good or excellent parenting and very poor or dangerous parenting might defined by what parents do for and with their children. What they don’t do is a given. Good enough parenting seems to be largely defined by practitioners as what parents don’t do. They do enough but, what they don’t do, is what perhaps what very good or very poor parents do.

14 Good Enough Parenting: some more thoughts If we were to apply a set of agreed measurable criteria to the role of parenting the distribution of outcomes would probably follow a normal curve. Any such measurable criteria would struggle to encapsulate the range of parenting skills and the multitude of individual tasks that parents perform throughout their children’s minority and beyond Good enough parenting is invisible.

15 Good Enough Parenting: a perspective Is good enough parenting: – a real-politic construct or a normative perspective; – an example of bounded rationality in response to the task of allocating scarce resources; – a libertarian view of non-intervention; or – a measurable set of parameters grounded in the evidence for achieving best outcomes for children? It’s probably all of these in some measure – depending on a particular individual’s relationship to a particular child

16 Good Enough Parenting: finally... Most parents are good enough most of the time Those who are judged as being often poor parents do not set out to be so – the deficit model is unhelpful when designing policies Good enough should not be viewed as a mediocrity but an approach “...to drive ongoing improvement and achieve excellence by progressively meeting, challenging, and raising our standards as opposed to driving toward an illusion of perfection” (Rastnapalan and Batty)

17 References Bettelheim, B. (1987) A Good Enough Parent: A book on child rearing. London: Thomas and Hudson Hoghhughi,M. and Speight, A. (1998) Good enough parenting for all children—a strategy for a healthier society. Archive of Diseases Childhood.78:4 293-296 Jones, D. (2001) The Assessment of Parental Capacity. Chapter 16 in Howarth, J. (Ed) The Child’s World: Assessing Children in Need. London: Jessica Kingsley Ratnapalan,S. and Batty, H. (2009). To be Good-enough. Canadian Family Physician, vol. 55 (March) 239-40 Sen, R. Green Lister, P. Rigby, P. And Kendrick, A. (2014) Grading the Graded Care Profile. Child Abuse Review, 23: 361–373 Srivastava, P. and Polnay, L (1997) Field trial of graded care profile (GCP) scale: a new measure of care, Archives of Disease in Childhood, 76 337–340 Winnicott, D (1964). The Child, the Family and the Outside World. London: Penguin


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