Parents and Children in the Inner City

Harriett Wilson, G.W. Herbert

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781135676674
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Aménagement urbain et paysager

This book was first published in 1978. The parents about whom the authors have written this book live in the poorest areas of a large city. They are widely dispersed; they do not know one another. There are certain features about their lives that bind them together and make them speak as if they had exchanged their views. Many come from large families and know the sorrows of premature death, disablement, stillbirth and unwanted pregnancy. This account of fifty-six families is an attempt to explore the interrelationship between the parents' circumstances and the difficulties encountered by their children.

Part one

DATA

Chapter 1

THE PROBLEM DEFINED

This book describes a study of families who are known to the social services department of a large Midlands city. The main objective of the study was to explore the development of two children in each family and to relate this to the social and economic circumstances of the home. Each family had one child aged between three and five, who participated in a nursery play group, and also a boy of school age, the main focus of the psychological observations. All families had five or more children, and lived in deprived inner areas of the city. Immigrant families (except Irish) were not included, to keep cultural factors as constant as possible. The families thus formed a sample of people under stress who at some stage had been unable to provide for the care of their children in the way that parents normally do, and this had led to self-referral or referral by some other person or agency to the social services department. Under Section I of the Children's and Young Persons’ Act, 1963, the department provides advice and assistance so as to diminish the need to receive children into care. The period of time during which families had contact with the department varied; some of them had received intensive support over a lengthy period of time, others had had short contact amounting to no more than four to six visits, no further action being considered necessary

LARGE FAMILIES

Large families are no longer typical of families in general. Average family size, as a measure of the number of children born to each married woman, has declined from approximately six children in the 1870s to a little over two children in recent years. There is a social-class trend, middle-class families tending to be smaller than working-class families on average, although fertility among professional families almost reached the mean family size for unskilled workers towards the end of the 1960s. In a national sample of children born in 1946 the percentage of children who come from large families (five or more) was found to be 16.5 (Douglas, 1964), and in a sample of children in Nottingham born about 1960 it was 19.0 (Newson and Newson, 1968). In another national sample of children born in 1958 more than one in every six children were found to belong to a family with five or more children (Pringle, Butler and Davie, 1966). The total number of children who grow up in large families is likely to be above two and a half million.

Large families are more typical of the manual working class. Only 6 per cent of families in classes I and II (professional and managerial) had five or more children in the Nottingham sample, in contrast with class IV (semi-skilled manual) with 20 per cent and class V (unskilled manual) with 38 per cent. In a sample of boys from a number of schools in a working-class area of London the percentages of boys with five or more siblings in classes IV and V were found to be 20.0 and 31.1 respectively (West, 1969). This study drew attention to the fact that a working-class community will contain a significantly larger proportion of children from large families compared with the national average: there was a deficit of small families, and almost one quarter of all families had five or more children. Similar findings are reported in four educational priority areas: the percentage of large families was 24 in Denaby, 30 in Deptford, 37 in Liverpool, and 55 in Birmingham (Halsey, 1972). Our sample was thus not untypical of a substantial minority of families living in deprived areas.

CONTACT WITH A SOCIAL SERVICES DEPARTMENT

How many families are in contact with their local authority over problems concerning their children's welfare? The annual report of the Department of Health and Social Security, 1972, states that under Section I a total of 203,863 applications for help or referrals had been made to departments in England and Wales during the preceding year. This number is some 50 per cent above that recorded by the Home Office Children's Department (as it then was) in 1969, when the total was 136,981 applications; and this again constitutes a 30 per cent increase over the figure of 109,245 recorded in 1967. This steadily increasing rate of applications suggests that, in all, over one million families applied for advice or help during the five-year period 1968-72, but it is not an accurate estimate as some authorities do not supply this information, and there may be some duplications of families. A clearer picture of the extent to which families contact the department is given in a study of disadvantaged children who are part of the National Child Development Study of 11,000 children born in 1958 (Wedge and Prosser, 1973). The definition of ‘disadvantage’ was as follows: the children were in either a one-parent or large family, they were badly housed, and they were in a low-income family. Ten per cent of this disadvantaged group were known to a social services department. In contrast, one in 300 of the remaining ‘ordinary’ families had contact with the social services.

From this information it appears that only a relatively small sector of families turns to a social services department for help, and they are almost entirely families under great material stress. An indication of the social and economic factors which most often give rise to contact with the department is provided by Packman (1968) who, in a survey of children in care, found that ‘illegitimate children, unemployed fathers, the lowest social classes, poorly housed and overcrowded families, newcomers and foreigners were all prominent’. The main factors rendering a family vulnerable appear to be poverty, inadequate housing, and isolation. But what factor or factors cause poverty, drive families with children into poor housing, create isolation and dependence on public services? Packman singles out unemployment and non-skilled occupations as well as the status of immigrants. Schaffer and Schaffer (1968) suggest ‘inadequacy’ in describing these families as ‘inadequate parents bringing up their children inadequately to become inadequate parents in their turn’. The inadequacy is seen as ‘a failure to act in a protective capacity’. The term is given a double meaning: it refers to inadequate functioning and to inadequacy of personality. While the former refers to an inability to live up to expected performance, the latter shifts the conceptual frame of reference to one of parental pathology. An inability to conform to expected standards may or may not be due to personality pathology; it may be due to low occupational status and low earning capacity, low per capita income, prolonged unemployment, sickness, or absence of a male wage earner, or other material stress factor. The differentiation between inadequacy of conditions leading to inadequate functioning and inadequacy of personality – however defined – is rarely undertaken. Instead, the complex process of interaction between circumstances and personality is summed up in terms of a causal relationship which postulates the personality as being the primary agent in the entire process, instead of according material stress at least a similar position. Prolonged stress affects mental states and behaviour, but this is rarely seen as an explanation of malfunction; nor is the more complex relationship of sub-normality and material stress – which frequently go together – understood as a challenge to inadequate provision.

The complexity of the problem resides not only in the links between material environment and human personality, but also in the making of judgments that have to be made in a study that concerns itself with the functional adequacy of human groups. A family whose main income earner has a low earning capacity may yet function adequately in conditions of full employment, at a wage level above the poverty line, in housing fit for family life, and supported by adequate health and social services. If, on the other hand, low earning capacity leads to frequent unemployment, and social security benefits are pegged at a level beneath the poverty line, such a family may learn to adapt to its stringent circumstances, but some essential element of that adaptation may be inimical to child development. The situations that motivate children in their own homes are governed by the constraints of their material circumstances, and they are different in nature from the situations encountered at school. Children adapt to family and neighbourhood, but in doing so they become maladapted to school. This is not necessarily maladjustment in the clinical sense, although occasionally they may react to maladaptation with behaviour looking like maladjustment -aggression, aimless truancy, withdrawal, passive conformity, and so on – and this may r...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• PROLOGUE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• Part One DATA
• Part Two CONVERSATIONS WITH PARENTS
• Part Three INTERPRETATION
• APPENDICES
• REFERENCES
• NAME INDEX
• SUBJECT INDEX