Family Policy and the New Government
Our family policy conference held on 13 July.
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Presentations at Policies for families..Challenges and Choices
Monday November 30 2009, Church House, London
Plenary speakers
Dr Katherine Rake OBE
Chief Executive, Family and Parenting Institute
Families 2020 - the big challenge
Fewer people are getting married; more children are being brought up in single parent households; there is a growing public debate about many parents' desire to balance work and family. Meanwhile, civil partnerships, assisted reproduction and gay adoption are challenging commonly held views of how a family is made; and fathers are struggling to understand their role within the family. We are on average living longer, the span of dependency is getting longer for some children - though not all - and there will be fewer of them to care for us when we grow old. The social context of family life is likely to continue to change in dramatic ways over the coming decade. Keeping up with the implications of these changes is almost impossible and we want to ask how, when we have no one notion of family anymore, we can achieve wellbeing for all.
Katja Forssen
Professor of Social Work and Head of the Department of Social Policy University of Turku, FinlandFamily policy: the Finnish experience
Finnish family policy is based on universal child benefits, parenthood allowances and a publicly supported daycare system for small children. Finland differs from countries with a conservative or liberal model in that it has invested in measures to reconcile work and family life. This presentation described the main elements of the Finnish family policy system and evaluated how changes in policy have affected the wellbeing of families with children. The recession in the 1990s changed the favourable development of family policy system in Finland and cuts had to be made in every social policy sector. The largest cuts in the family policy field were made at the end of the 1990s. Changes in family policy had an influence on the wellbeing of children. Social trends in the 1990s and 2000s strained the livelihood of parents with small children in terms of their income, working life and services at their disposal.
Professor Jackie Scott
Professor of Empirical Sociology, University of Cambridge
Changing gender roles:Can Policy improve gender inequalities in paid and unpaid work?
Public support for gender equality appears to have peaked and could now be going into decline in some countries, including Britain. There is mounting concern that women who play a full and equal role in the workplace do so at the expense of family life. Although there are no signs of a full-scale gender role backlash, there is growing sympathy for the view that a women's place is in the home rather than in the office. Public attitudes are becoming more supportive of women's employment, up to a point, followed by a retreat. The resilience of traditional gender roles are not surprising given the existing gender imbalance in the distribution of paid and unpaid work. Women and men will continue to have unequal pay and status in the labour market, while women have less paid work experience than men because they do the bulk of unpaid family care. Policies can help nudge egalitarianism forwards, but progress towards a more even gender divide of paid and unpaid work is uneven across countries and painfully slow. New forms of family and parenting inequalities in the 21st century require new policy thinking.
Rt Hon Ed Balls MP
Secretary of State for Children, Schools and FamiliesMatthew Taylor
Chief Executive of the Royal Society of Arts.Who we are and who we want to be
Research into neuro and behavioural science has changed and deepened our understanding of human nature. At the same time, there has been a stronger normative strand in social policy making. How can we overlay insights into who we are with the goal of enhanced citizenship? In particular, we need to understand the importance of social norms and social networks and the complexities and challenges of seeking to shape them.Workshops
1. Susanna Abse
Director, The Tavistock Centre for Couple RelationshipsIntimacy in couples and families: the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow?
Since the 1970s there has been a growing sense that the personal is political and that governments have taken an increasing role in promoting ordinary personal happiness in our family lives. All political parties now recognise the importance of close relationships and the need to foster and support them. But what is intimacy? And can we really help people achieve it? What promotes intimacy between people, what prevents it and how important is it for us to thrive? This workshop will explore the development of the capacity for closeness and intimacy and discuss how early experiences in childhood may translate into our adult relationships.
2. Dr Janet Boddy
Senior Research Officer, Thomas Coram Research Unit, Institute of EducationLearning from difference: European perspectives on parenting support
This workshop drew on findings from Dr Boddy's two recent cross-European studies of parenting and family support, funded by the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF). The first study was a review of parenting support in Denmark, France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, and the second focused on work with young people and their families at the 'edges' of care - when placement away from home is being considered - through a comparison of England, Denmark, Germany and France. The research offers new perspectives and highlights the potential for shared learning. The workshop will address three key issues: accessibility to services; differences and commonalities in approaches to parenting and family support; and the parenting and family support workforce in different countries, including the role of social pedagogy in the work.
See also:
3. Professor Hilton Davis
Emeritus Professor of Child Health Psychology, Centre for Parent and Child Support, South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust and King's College London/Institute of PsychiatryThe ingredients of successful intervention
Social and emotional problems in children and families are a major source of disability and have significant implications for society. Since it can be argued that services are not meeting these needs effectively, and that this is at least partly due to the lack of an explicit model of helping, the aim of this workshop will be to describe the Family Partnership Model, as a framework for making sense of the helping processes. It is intended as a simple guide for practitioners, the design of services and research on which service development can be built. The implications of the model for staff selection, training and managerial support will be discussed in order to explore the notion that service effectiveness lies as much with the personal qualities and skills of practitioners and the relationships they establish with families as with specific intervention techniques. By way of evaluation, this model meets the requirements of parents, has reasonable validity in terms of processes and effectiveness, and complements most other content-based approaches if they are to be effective.
4. Sumi Hollingworth, Dr Anthea Rose and Anne Page
Institute for Policy Studies in Education, with Anne Page, Policy and Public Education Manager, Family and Parenting Institute
Parental engagement, family learning and technology: a workshop discussing recent research findings
The workshop looked at recent research into parents' experiences of communicating with schools and using technologies in the home. It looked at how schools use technology to communicate with parents and how this can be improved upon, the barriers some parents face in engaging with schools, what parents want from schools to better engage in their children's learning, how children and parents are using technologies in the home and some of the barriers to learning in the family. The research, carried out by the Institute for Policy Studies in Education (IPSE) with the Family and Parenting Institute (FPI) for Becta, makes recommendations on how best to harness technology to engage parents in their children's learning.
5. Dr Sebastian Kraemer
Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist, Whittington Hospital, London
Not the Jerry Springer show!
Working with families means entering a drama where all the players already know each other's lines, but you don't know anything. Using our own brief vignettes, this predicament was explored and participants helped each other make sense of the play, and our parts in it. A Jerry Springer show is always going on in the background of most families, and in the foreground of some. While working with families we need to listen to our own experience. Skilled staff can be very anxious, and may try to help beyond their capacity or remit. A confidential peer group is the safest place to explore otherwise unmentionable anxieties and prejudices. Seeing the family's life as a drama helps us to take our reactions to it more seriously, rather than focusing our energy on getting the 'facts'. The post-Laming fetish for information blinds us to the greater need for understanding based on paying attention to our hunches, imaginings and prejudices.
6. Penny Mansfield, Dr Lester Coleman, Jan Mitcheson and Justine Devenney
Director, One Plus One and Heads of Research, Practice Developmentand Policy and Dissemination, One Plus One
Strengthening and supporting parent relationships - the missing link
There is now compelling evidence that how parents get on - or don't get on - influences children's lives, affecting the health and wellbeing of the family. We know poor quality parental relationships, whether parents are living together or not, can result in poor parenting and poor quality parentchild interactions, with associated risks for social, emotional and educational outcomes for children. We will present our research findings from two important reviews and outline the reasons why we must focus on supporting the parental relationship if outcomes for children are to be improved. The workshop will be participative and encourage you to consider what happens when relationships break down and who might be most at risk, as well as how to spot the early signs of relationship distress. There will also be an opportunity for you to try out some of the innovative resources developed by One Plus One, that can be used with parents to support and protect the couple relationship.
7. Aleksandra Novakovic and Leezah Hertzmann
Psychoanalytical psychotherapists and clinical lecturers, The Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships
Inter-parental conflict: a co-parenting group intervention
The Co-Parenting Group was designed as an early supportive intervention for vulnerable children and parents. Its goal was to support parents in finding new ways of dealing with inter-parental conflict that was having a considerable and adverse impact on the child. The Co-Parenting Group was funded by the DCSF and facilitated by two clinicians from The Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships, in liaison with voluntary and statutory organisations in an inner-city borough. The aim of this workshop is to present a Co-Parenting Group intervention and a rationale for providing a group intervention for parents who are struggling with inter-parental conflict and to describe both the benefits of working with parents in the group format and the themes that emerged in the course of the work.
8. Honor Rhodes
Honor Rhodes, Director of Development and Innovation, Family and Parenting Institute
Families who trouble us and how to measure the impact of what we do with them
Many of us are working with families in trouble and deep distress. We usually have a good idea about what we might do that would be helpful but have often struggled to find firm evidence to show that what we do actually works to support positive change. This workshop was designed to help the participants work with families effectively and to use a range of valid and reliable measuring tools to demonstrate change over time. The workshop covered topics such as: planning and starting; the first meeting; using our own feelings and how to manage them; using contracts, family logs, rewards and sanctions; developing confidence and perseverance in the face of hostility or resistance; working with families who are different to ourselves; using supervision effectively; research-based approaches; and how to help families sustain positive change.
See also:
Knowing what you do works: Measuring your own effectiveness with families, parents and children: a short guide
Further reading
Design:This Way Up
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