Harriet Clarke

Introduction: Family Minded Policy and Whole Family Practice – Developing a Critical Research Framework

During the first decade of the twenty-first century, UK policy and practice has become increasingly overt in its concern with families . In January 2010, the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF, 2010) launched the Support for All: The Families and Relationships Green Paper. In its Foreword, Ed Balls, the then Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, presented ‘Strong, stable families’ as ‘the bedrock of our society’, positioning the Green Paper as ‘supporting families to help themselves’, whilst ‘ensuring that all public services play their part in supporting strong and resilient family relationships’ (DCSF, 2010: 3). The Centre for Social Justice offered an immediate response with its own Green Paper on the Family , emphasising the role of ‘family breakdown’ as ‘the root’ of ‘pathways to poverty’ for many, as well as a barrier to appropriate childhood development and positive ‘future life outcomes’ (Centre for Social Justice, 2010: 4).

Assessing fitness to practise and managing work-based placement

This article describes the experience of Nottingham and Birmingham Universities in partnership with workers from Advocacy In Action and shows that service‐users, carers and other eligible citizens can and should be involved in deciding fitness for practice and in the managing of that practice, and that such involvement enhances the student experience and lays the foundations for partnership working in the professional arena. The users and citizen stakeholders of social services are a valuable resource in respect of all aspects of service planning, delivery and control. In respect of social work education, their involvement is too valuable an opportunity to miss and we look forward to further exciting partnerships in the field of practice learning.

Disability, partnership and parenting

Partnerships and parenthood can have important effects on economic, social and psychological well-being. We provide new long-term analysis of how disability affects both parental status and partnerships. Analysis of the new Life Opportunities Survey, which is based on social model approaches, demonstrates that disabled people are more likely than non-disabled people to face disadvantages in terms of family formation. Disabled people are more likely to remain single over time, although there is less evidence for any differences in rates of relationship breakdown for those who enter them. Allied to these conclusions, disabled adults are less likely to form households where there are dependent children. These conclusions are supported by longitudinal results from the British Household Panel Survey.

Disabled men and fathering: opportunities and constraints

Over the last decade in the UK and elsewhere, fathers have become a visible presence in research and social welfare policy and practice agendas. While there is an increasing awareness of the heterogeneity of fathering contexts and experiences, disability as a dimension of difference among fathers has received little attention. This is so across all relevant bodies of research, including those on fathering, masculinities, disability, and parenting. In this paper, we seek to contribute to filling this gap by exploring the experiences of disabled men in relation to their fathering experiences. We draw on the findings from two qualitative research projects conducted in the UK, one on the experiences of disabled parents (mothers and fathers), the other on the experiences of disabled fathers. The findings suggest that the experience of impairment and disability positions men in relation to fathering in ways which can be both constraining of their fathering practices, as well as opportunistic in terms of re-articulating more ‘traditional’ fathering identities and practices. We suggest that while disability intersects with other important social divisions, there is a need for further research focused on the shared experiences of disabled fathers, particularly to inform family and child welfare policy and practice agendas.

Supporting Parents to Support Family Life: A Central Challenge for Family Minded Policy

Disabled parents can experience difficulties when trying to access services to support their parenting role, and this is exacerbated wherever disability continues to be articulated as if it were impairment and associated with a need for ‘care’. Disabled parents and their families experiences of services demonstrate that, for a family approach to be positively developed within social policy, individuals should be kept in sharp focus by policy makers, practitioners and researchers. Failure to do so can result in the problematisation of parents who have support requirements, itself a barrier to the development of appropriate services for parents and families.

Contemporary Fathering: Theory, Policy and Practice

A challenge for all contributing to family focused research and practice, and the emergent father-inclusive agenda, is to avoid creating or deferring to over-simplified representations of how fathers (and mothers, and others) experience both family life and service provision. The scholarly achievement of Contemporary Fathering is to meet this challenge, ensuring that experiences of fatherhood are understood in historical, political, socio-economic, practice and personal contexts. It is clear that fathers should be understood relationally, to ensure that lives-as-lived are to the fore and that gender equity and child wellbeing issues are incorporated into the analysis. Policy and practice are important, not only because of their direct influence in intervention terms, but also because approaches and practices themselves support particular public and private discourses. The first three chapters engage with policy and practice issues concerning father involvement, integrating consideration of the diversity of family forms. Chapter One provides observations on the current practice and policy context and the contributions of theory (bothdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary, such as contributions from feminism) to developing understandings of fatherhood. Chapter Two explores the contemporary context in which fathering occurs, examining recent social change as regards marriage, cohabitation, lone mothering and fathering, and stepfamilies. Shifts towards open adoption and openness about paternity (e.g. in relation to reproductive technologies) are shown tohave influencedhow family life is experienced. Patternsof paid employment and domestic work for men and women with children are presented. The following chapter turns to historical analyses about the role of fathers, tracing evidence from pre-industrial society through to the twentieth century, including the establishment of the welfare state. Here discussion about who is represented (and how, and why) within documents (for example in relation to actual practices versus ideal depictions) chimes with concerns that researchers might recognize in relation to contemporary representations. The next section explores specific disciplinary contributions interweaving analysis from critical theories. Chapter Four examines how psychoanalytic analyses have constructed fathers and mothers (including Freud’s focus on the father–child relationship, Klein’s consideration of the infant’s developing psychology in relationship with their mother, and Lacan’s symbolic father). Feminist scholars (and

Disabilità e tipologie familiari: note dal Regno Unito per la comprensione delle dinamiche familiari della povertà

Disability and Family Forms: Messages from the UK for Understanding Family Poverty Dynamics - There is limited evidence concerning the effect of impairment and disability experiences on the dynamics of family forms. We can summarise, from large cross-sectional data including the 2001 Census, that having a disability is associated with lower rates of marriage, controlling for age, and having fewer children. Some impairments appear to have very large effects. Our analysis then draws on longitudinal data from BHPS and FACS and suggests that for some disabled people there are significant barriers in accessing partnerships and parenting. This increased likelihood of lone parenting amongst disabled adults and parents of disabled children is of note in relation to a range of policy areas, including maternal employment, care (including parenting), child care and economic well-being. Our analysis also considers movements into and out of poverty; some of the effects of disability occur through a higher risk of poverty, but there remain effects attributable specifically to disability.