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Investing in Children, Regulating Parents, Thinking Family: A Decade of Tensions and Contradictions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 September 2010

Kate Morris  and
Brid Featherstone
Kate Morris
Affiliation:
Centre for Social Work, University of Nottingham, UK E-mail: [email protected]
Brid Featherstone
Affiliation:
National University of Ireland, Galway
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Abstract

This article describes the contested and underdeveloped backdrop to ‘“whole family” approaches’, whereby families with care and protection needs are caught in a conflicting set of policy and practice expectations concerning responsibility to care whilst being positioned as families that fail. Questions are raised about how supported families are to navigate their way through these permissive and punitive policies and practices. We suggest that there is an urgent need for more ‘bottom–up’ research informed by the ethic of care to develop the kinds of policies and practices that might make it more possible for them to do so.

Type
Themed Section on Family Minded Policy and Whole Family Practice
Information
Social Policy and Society , Volume 9 , Issue 4 , October 2010 , pp. 557 - 566
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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