I am going to write three blogs in quick succession on the Good Childhood Report – one on supporting c0-parenting instead of individual parenting, one on parents and work and one on pregnancy and birth.
Supporting co-parenting instead of individual parenting
Parenting in Britain is seen as an individual activity. When a baby is due to be born, the NHS registers one parent only and targets one parent with information about baby health and baby care. Only one parent is given time off work enough to be able to care for the baby. Nearly all parenting support programmes are designed to engage with one parent only and are evaluated on this basis. When parents separate, only one parent gets child benefit and all the tax reliefs and benefits that go with that, whatever degree of sharing there is. Where there is serious conflict between parents, it is vanishingly rare for both parents to get adequate support.
The public debate this week about parents working focuses only on one parent – the mother – and debates whether she should work less; it does not consider whether fathers should work less, even though they work for more than mothers.
Anything to do with two parents is controversial – relationships between parents are held to be a private matter, supporting two parents together is seen as a risk to support services for a parent living alone.
And then there are the practical difficulties – working with two parents together, particularly if living apart or (worse) in conflict, and working with men, both require skills and knowledge that are simply not widespread in the children’s workforce. Training for this workforce currently involves no challenge to personal beliefs and prejudices about men in parenting roles.
The Good Childhood Report unequivocally and absolutely repudiates this approach. It does not just say that parental relationships are important – it says they are the most important thing in the world for children. “Parents getting on well is one of the most important factors in raising happy children.” “How can we reduce the level of conflict in family life? Nothing is more important for children than this.” “We need above all to reverse the increase in family conflict.”
And so we have the biggest study of childhood ever taken in the UK stating that the most important thing in the world for children is the very thing that is most notably overlooked in the entire infrastructure of family support. One could not set a more radical agenda for change.
Just before the Good Childhood Report, a campaign to support parental relationships got underway backed by 24 of the nation’s Agony Aunts and Uncles – Kids in the Middle. The campaign has already mobilised millions of pounds of Government spending and is now gearing up as a major partnership between relationship and parenting organisations. It is calling for exactly the same things as the Good Childhood Report is proposing: real and effective relationship education in schools, relationship support around the birth of a baby, child centred support for separating couples with an emphasis on reducing conflict and maintaining the child’s relationship with both sides of the family.
What with this and the Good Childhood Report, the prospects for real change are very promising.
