seven - Parental and family support services

Summary

Introduction

This chapter examines developments in parental and family support services from 1997 to 2010. Informal family support refers to the multiple ways people care for one another and provide support for family roles (ie by providing emotional, practical, financial, advisory or childcare support). Informal social support within families and social networks builds social bonds and capital and is associated with practical and emotional support for parents and parental and child well-being, particularly maternal mental health (Quinton, 2004). In contrast, ‘formal family support services’ are services ‘explicitly aimed at supporting parents, families and carers in fulfilling their roles and responsibilities for caring and raising children’ (Barlow et al, 2007). In practice, formal family support services may see their aims and objectives in ways that relate to service silos, professional specialisms and boundaries (Penn and Gough, 2002). Formal services are provided by statutory and voluntary sector agencies (and may include funding for ‘semi-formal’, ‘selfhelp’ or ‘community’ groups or organisations (Williams and Churchill, 2006)). A distinction can be made between ‘parenting services’ and ‘family support services’. According to Barlow et al (2007, p 5), the former refers to ‘interventions aimed at increasing parenting skills, improving parent–child relationships, improving parental insight, attitudes and behaviour, and increasing parental confidence’, that is, interventions that seek to ‘enhance parenting’.

Chapter Four highlighted the ‘neoliberal’ approach to family support in the 1990s in the UK. Statutory family support services were for children and families in need or ‘children at risk’ of harm (Children Act 1989). However, during the 1990s the ‘refocusing’ debate called for more preventative family support measures, including parent education (DH, 1995). From 1998, Labour developed a more explicit family policy aimed at ‘supporting parents and parenting’, ‘reducing child poverty’, ‘supporting working parents’, ‘reducing social exclusion’ and ‘promoting child well-being’. Since 1997 a number of policies have created ‘new sites of family and parenting support’ (Featherstone, 2004). This chapter charts the evolution of Labour's policy agendas and developments in this field. It shows how policy objectives were informed by Labour's overarching economic and social policy objectives: to raise productivity via higher employment rates and reduce social exclusion via family support reforms and child-centred investment. Informing these objectives was the agenda to revise the social contract between families, citizens and the state to promote active, responsible citizenship (and for parents to raise future active citizens).