Family Support Work in the Community: Parenting

I mainly looked at parenting policy:
DFSE (2006) Parenting Support: Guidance for Local Authorities. Every Child Matters
DFES (2006) The Market for Parent and Family Support Services
Sheffield City Council (????) Parenting Matters: Parenting Support in Sheffield

From this I found…

Evidence FOR responsibility being passed on to the women in the family in particular

Ÿ Findings show that users of universal services are underrepresented by fathers. This is concluded to be because services don’t engage with fathers, and because most services are within the working day - excluding working parents. (also highlighted in DFES research into the Market for Parent and Family Support Services)

Ÿ Because parenting services currently seem to only engage with and cater for mothers, there seems to be a definite emphasis of caring responsibility placed on women.

Ÿ The table below shows their main findings as barriers and enablers regarding fathers accessing parenting and family support services (hope you can read it - it doesn’t look very clear on my computer!):

Ÿ The research also highlights that one weakness in engaging with fathers is that there are not enough male staff, so even employment in community services seems to focus caring responsibility onto females. (there’s another table with this but its even harder to read that the one above so Ive not included it!)

Ÿ Evidence gathered from case study authorities suggests that the majority of Children’ Centres are struggling in their early efforts to engage with fathers effectively. “Father’s involvement has been very, very minimal – not even 1%, which is very unfortunate.” Local Sure Start Programme Manager



Evidence AGAINST responsibility being passed on to the women in the family in particular

Ÿ Suggestions have been made to extend services beyond the school day to accommodate for working parents (though this is still a minority of services)

Ÿ Some regions have introduced new policies which aim to place a greater emphasis on good parenting amongst both parents (e.g. Manchester Parenting Strategy) (though again no practical examples are given of this in practice)

Ÿ Research has now been made to try to identify ways of engaging with fathers (see http://www.dfes.gov.uk/research/data/uploadfiles/rw72.pdf) Policy and objectives have been changed to try and incorporate this in the future.


Case studies??

I’ve also been in touch with some people that I used to work with from the NHS, NSPCC, the YMCA and Barnardo’s to see if they can provide any case study info we might be able to use. Im still waiting to hear if this is possible, but when I worked there most parenting work was entirely focused on supporting the mothers, possible because:

Ÿ For cultural reasons some groups were specifically for women only - meaning that sometimes even if fathers did want to attend they were turned away
Ÿ Timing of classes was always within working hours, excluding any working parents (usually the fathers). The only fathers who were catered for were teen fathers, who could attend specific day sessions.
Ÿ There were no male staff in a lot of cases
Ÿ The majority of referrals from social services were for the mothers rather than the fathers when it came to requesting information about play groups and parenting classes - it wasn’t something that fathers were ‘expected’ to attend. Not sure if that’s the professionals fault or whether its cultural expectations.