Early Intervention

In August’s edition of The Psychologist, Ruby Bell, Head of Forensic Psychology at Roseberry Park Hospital, Middlesbrough, quotes Carson McCullers who said that, “the hearts of small children are delicate organs.  A cruel beginning in this world can twist them into curious shapes.”  Looks like Ms McCullers was an early Early Interventionist.

In the same edition, Jean Gross, England’s Communication Champion in 2008, acknowledges her fascination with "the research on how children’s secure attachment and communication skills develop in the earliest years through warm interaction with caregivers … so that every child will get the best start in life.”  Early Intervention is where it’s at.

Troubled Families … Troubled Society?

In the warm after-glow of Olympic glory it might seem churlish to take issue with Louise Casey’s report.  In her introduction she starts by reminding us that, in December 2010, “the Prime Minister set out that he wanted troubled families’ lives to be turned around by the end of this Parliament” and to fund this work £448 million has been found across government.  One can only applaud a Prime Minister who has such a desire and a government that is prepared to make such a commitment.  But it’s worth looking a little closer at what’s involved.

Forty years ago I started working in a therapeutic community that had previously been a senior approved school.  We found that four to five years of ‘milieu therapy’ enabled the great majority of the community’s young residents to turn their lives around.  The five figure cost for each resident was significantly less than the cost of imprisoning them had the community not existed.  So Mr Cameron might be indulging in a degree of wishful thinking if he thinks that a “troubled family” can manage a similar change in the three years that are left of this Parliament, and at a cost of less than £4000 per family.  But good luck.

Let’s set that aside, and let’s not worry too much whether there are only 120,000 troubled families in need of help.  I want to take a closer look at Ms Casey’s report.  Needless to say this will be from the perspective of someone who has worked for a number of years with young fathers-to-be.

The body of the report contains 16 case studies.  Those of us who have worked with ‘disturbed and disturbing’ young people won’t find anything there to surprise us.  Indeed we were familiar with the same sad litany of experiences forty years ago.  That was at a time when “a short sharp shock” was in vogue.  At least we’ve moved on a bit since then.  But it’s instructive to note that three-quarters of the interviews were with young women only.  Only three were with couples and one with a father.

After the interviews comes an analysis of “what the interviews tell us.”  This appears under fourteen headings.  One of these is “Teenage mothers”.  No discussion about the issues facing young fathers.  They remain invisible.  It’s not that fathers don’t get a look-in.  “The majority of the families described absent biological fathers and fathers taking a very casual approach to parenthood and relationships.  For example, as soon as the relationship between the parents breaks down, the father disappears from the family never to be heard of again … the fathers are rarely around ... The influence of male partners was often negative”.

Research evidence is clear about the importance of fathers in the healthy emotional and social development of their children, not that we should require such evidence to convince us of a self-evident fact.  But I can’t see how the cross-departmental programme being driven forward by Eric Pickles’ Department of Communities & Local Government will have any impact on the fathers of troubled families if they “are rarely around".  Instead the programme begins to look like an attempt at a sticking plaster cure for a problem that has much deeper roots in modern British society.  Of course we’ve always been better at advocating cures, and paying for them – remember those short sharp shocks – rather than engaging in an adult debate about underlying causes and working towards the prevention of problems before they arise.  Last year’s riots cost at least £133 million (The Guardian, 6 September 2011).  How much better to have spent that money on preventative strategies in advance rather than on paying for the aftermath.

You won’t be surprised if I suggest that engaging with young fathers-to-be might be one such preventative strategy.  In a cohort of young men with whom I worked in recent years, two-thirds of the relationships broke down within two years of the birth of their children.  Yet in almost all cases they remained in contact with their partners and had continuing involvement with their children.  Mentoring along the lines of Brighton’s Band of Brothers, whose mentors are all volunteers, is another.   Which reminds me of the Olympics and the Games Making volunteers, the Big Society in action.  240,000 people applied to be Games Makers, twice as many as Ms Casey’s 120,000 troubled families.  The spirit of volunteering is alive and kicking, and this despite the cynicism and anger engendered by banking meltdown and misdemeanours, seven figure ‘compensation’ packages, the bonus culture, and endemic tax-dodging.  Perhaps there’s a message here for policy-makers who not only want to inspire a generation but recognise the need to engage with it too.  That warm after-glow might take longer to dissipate.

The Moral Maze

Should the state intervene in the lives of troubled families?  Centred around Louise Casey’s report, last night’s Radio 4 programme generated plenty of heat.  It was only late in the programme that ‘fatherlessness’ was raised as a specific issue of concern.  If you didn’t hear it, and have 45 minutes to spare, check it out on iPlayer.

Listening To Troubled Families

Here’s the link to Louise Casey’s report.
http://www.communities.gov.uk/publications/communities/listeningtroubledfamilies
Now to read, absorb and reflect on what it has to say.

Louise Casey’s report

Ms Casey received a good grilling from John Humphreys this morning and it will be interesting to read her report.  It’s not immediately obvious where to get hold of a copy on the web so I’ve sent off a couple of emails in the hope that I can lay my hands on one.

Effects of paternal rejection

New research from the University of Connecticut (http://psr.sagepub.com/content/16/2/103.full) has revealed that the love of a father is one of the greatest influences on the personality development of a child.  It concluded that a father’s love contributes as much - and sometimes more - to a child’s development than does a mother’s love.  The finding was part of large-scale analysis from more than 500 studies about the power of parental rejection and acceptance in shaping our personalities as children and into adulthood.

"In our half-century of international research, we’ve not found any other class of experience that has as strong and consistent effect on personality and personality development as does the experience of rejection, especially by parents in childhood,"' says Ronald Rohner who co-authored the new study in Personality and Social Psychology Review.

A 13-nation team of psychologists working on the International Father Acceptance Rejection Project has developed at least one explanation for this difference: that children and young adults are likely to pay more attention to whichever parent they perceive to have higher interpersonal power or prestige.  So if a child perceives her father as having higher prestige, he may be more influential in her life than the child’s mother.

One important message from this research is that fatherly love is critical to a person’s development.  "The importance of a father’s love should help motivate many men to become more involved in nurturing child care,” Rohner says.  Additionally, he added, widespread recognition of the influence of fathers on their children’s personality development should help reduce the incidence of 'mother blaming' for trouble children.  "The great emphasis on mothers and mothering in America has led to an inappropriate tendency to blame mothers for children’s behaviour problems and maladjustment when, in fact, fathers are often more implicated than mothers in the development of problems such as these.”

The research underlines the need to address the issues surrounding ‘fatherless’ families.

Parenting classes - they're all the rage

Vouchers from Boots.  Parent Gym.  Something's in the air.

But, to coin a phrase, will this support reach those young people that other support doesn't reach?  There's plenty of evidence to suggest not.  Sure Start centres have certainly found this to be the case.  I worked with one young couple who lived less than one minute's walk from the Children's Centre on their housing estate.  Nothing could persuade them to go there.  One reason was because, as Jo (not her real name) put it, "I learnt not to trust adults because I didn't trust my parents."  Yet her partner completed our young dads-to-be course and she gained a level 1 Award for Money Management and a Level 2 Award for Effective Parenting.  And their little son was a delight.

Of course, we were meeting on a 1:1 basis, hardly a corporate model.  But what was as important to them as the courses and their achievements was that they learnt that there were some adults who were reliable and could be trusted.

So while any parenting support is to be welcomed, particularly from the very earliest stages of pregnancy, it remains to be seen whether those young people the government really needs to help will respond to texts and emails, let alone turn up to "classes".  Sounds a bit like school.  Many of them have had less than positive experiences there, usually a consequence of their childhood experiences.

Most young people want to be 'good enough' parents.  All the young men with whom I worked wanted to be better fathers than their own fathers had been to them. But too often there's talk about the need to support 'single mothers'.  Yet for every one of them there's a 'single father' somewhere.  Yet the word 'father' often never gets mentioned.  And you don't hear about the importance of working with 'single fathers' before they become single.  There's enough evidence, not that it should be needed, about the contribution fathers make to the healthy social and emotional development of their children.  And there are enough concerns about the outcomes for 'fatherless' families.  One can only hope that "parenting classes" will address these issues.

My evidence is that young men will respond to work that is aimed specifically at them.  My concern is that they will feel that "parenting classes" are only really aimed at the mothers of their children, as are so many other services.  To quote a wise old sage, "I could be wrong."  Let's hope so.

Early Intervention

Parenting UK’s March News Bulletin pointed out that one of the key recommendations of Graham Allen’s review on early intervention was a national parenting campaign which would “ensure that the public, parents, health professionals and, especially, newly pregnant women are aware of the importance of developing social and emotional capability in the first years of life, and understand the best ways of encouraging good later outcomes for their children.”

All entirely laudable but some of us might think this laudable intention would be better expressed if, after the phrase newly pregnant women, the phrase and their partners was inserted.

News about the young dads-to-be course

A couple of agencies in the south west have already acquired the licence to run the course. Last week I learnt that a third intended to do so, and yesterday I met with three workers from another south west agency. They really like the look of the course and its contents, so I hope to receive their order soon. I’ve also been approached to run a workshop at a conference in May and will post more information about that in a while.

Media interest, of sorts

We received an approach from another film maker recently who are "working on a ground-breaking new series for Channel 4 that will turn documentary film-making on its head – by putting the cameras in the hands of the documentary subjects themselves. The series will follow five men (of different ages and backgrounds) as they film their own lives. We are looking for insightful men who are able to speak about their hopes, challenges, joys and fears and take viewers on a journey through their lives. We are hoping that one of these men might be a young father or a young father-to-be."

I put them in touch with a couple of the guys but, surprise, surprise, the company and/or Channel 4 have changed their minds and are changing the focus of the programme, or so they say. Yet another reminder of the perils of associating with media. I really should have learnt that lesson by now.

Good for The Guardian

Today’s edition carries two great articles. On p36 “Boys don’t suddenly become men at 18” describes the work of A Band of Brothers, a Brighton-based mentoring project which links older local men with disaffected young men, helping them in the transition to manhood. If this sort of programme could be rolled out nationwide, it might help ameliorate some of the issues faced by the 500,000 families we’re suddenly reading about.

Two pages further on there’s “Birth of a new era for fathers” (let’s hope). A full page article outlines the outcome of a roundtable discussion on 14th March involving 16 professionals from a variety of backgrounds. At least two of the participants also took in an earlier roundtable discussion at Portcullis House on 6th February, helping to "formulate the Labour Party’s position on fathers.”

And if A Band of Brothers can mentor disaffected young men, then it’s not too great a leap of imagination to suggest that disadvantaged young fathers-to-be could be profitably mentored in a similar way on their journey towards fatherhood.

Early Intervention

It looks like a Guardian journalist might be on our side. In yesterday’s edition, Suzanne Moore said, “we need to target children we try not to see, but who live among us, who are deeply neglected.” Of course it would be even better if we could avoid having to target such children by preventing that need by intervening earlier in the lives of their parents.

The Teenage Pregnancy Myth

Keen readers of this blog will be aware that Graham Allen’s Early Intervention review contained the word ‘mother’ nearly 8 times more than the word ‘father’. Radio 4’s programme on Monday, The Teenage Pregnancy Myth, went rather better. The words ‘mother’, ‘motherhood’ and ‘mum’ were mentioned 65 times, the word ‘father’ only 3 times, with the familiar ‘feckless’ adjective being attached to one of these. And a mother of a teenage mother was interviewed, but not the father.

It’s not that word counts say anything about the value of any document or programme. But they do suggest that the fact that men are also involved in pregnancy, that fathers are important in the lives of their children (see my paper at http://www.thepsychologist.org.uk/archive/archive_home.cfm/volumeID_23-editionID_184-ArticleID_1644-getfile_getPDF/thepsychologist/0310whit1.pdf), and that some of the consequences of fatherless families are of concern (see the previous post) are being glossed over.

More media dad stuff

The perils of reading The Daily Telegraph - in yesterday’s edition its political editor reported on an “official review into the causes of last summer’s riots (which) is expected to highlight the lack of “male role models” for many of the youths arrested in the wake of the widespread disturbances.”

The report can be found at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/family/9135087/The-72000-problem-families-with-no-father-and-no-male-role-model.html and points out that the majority of Britain’s 120,000 ‘problem families’ are fatherless. Of course, they’re not fatherless because somewhere there’s a father. So it might be profitable to develop policies that tackle the causes of 'fatherlessness', alongside those that only deal with its consequences. Prevention as opposed to cure once again.

Dads Matter Too - the DVD

It’s always good to receive a bit of praise so it was great to read the following from a contact who is interested in Dads Matter Too - the course. She said that the DVD had “gone down very well with our young mums who are keen for us to offer it out to the dads. Would it be possible to purchase 2 or 3 copies please?” It’s encouraging that someone is finding it relevant three years after it first appeared.