Children’s Wellbeing in the family
Posted in Uncategorized, child wellbeing on October 19th, 2009 by Sally – Be the first to commentToday I attended a meeting of the All Party Parliamentary Group for Children and the Associate Parliamentary Group for Parents and Families (a bit of a mouthful!) which has chosen ‘Children’s Wellbeing’ as its theme for 2008/9. Having already discussed children’s wellbeing in the context of social care and schools (meetings that I unfortunately missed), this final meeting in the series was billed as bringing the topic back to the core of children’s lives – their families. The discussion was introduced by Clem Henricson of the Family and Parenting Institute (FPI), Dr Helen Barrett (FPI) and Elizabeth Young (Homestart).
The introductions all more or less assumed that families need help with maintaining wellbeing (which broadly means educating parents) and that most services should be available universally (even if not taken up universally); the underlying question being asked was how we should conceptualise and measure wellbeing in order to justify to policy makers that it was worth them spending money on this in the context of recession.
Whereas the old goals of intervention in family life such as reduction in poverty, improvements in health, and educational achievement were more easily measured, wellbeing as a motivator for social policy intervention is a very subjective category and therefore outcomes simply cannot be measured in the ‘old fashioned’ way through evidence based research, ‘ticking boxes’ and ‘hard facts’.
Family ‘wellbeing’ is acknowledged as a moral category, the interventions it leads all being based around changing behaviour by helping parents to parent – whether this is through Sure Start programmes, Homestart (where volunteers offer to visit families that are often resistant to social work intervention) or parenting programmes. The desired outcome of these interventions is to change the way that people parent and to bring individual parents into line with perceived best practice in parenting techniques. In line with this, suggested measurable outcomes included the perception of happiness by the families themselves, whether families were healthy and successful, the development of positive social relationships, safety, self-esteem. It was even suggested that we should try to measure the extent to which parents change their behaviour to one of ‘play and praise’ (at least I think I heard that correctly).
The problem for parenting professionals is a genuine one – finding ways to measure the outcomes of their interventions is almost impossible as their intervention is into the very centre of our private lives, and when our private lives are put under such scrutiny, each family is different and each intervention will have a slightly different outcome. Unfortunately, the lack of measurable outcomes is unlikely to lead to any questioning of the wellbeing agenda. The mood of the meeting seemed to be that those bodies that promote family wellbeing shouldn’t really have to justify their interventions at all – they can just assert that they are morally good.