Safeguarding and Promoting the Well-being of Children, Families and Communities

Jane Scott, Harriet Ward

• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9781843101413
• eBook ISBN: 9781846422461
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

Improving the well-being of children is more effective when social care professionals work with the children's parents, families and communities. This collection brings together innovative interventions designed to nurture children's health and welfare, and analyses which types of programmes are most effective and why.

The contributors explore the impact of poverty on children's development and assess national initiatives set up to assess and reduce need. They present examples from the UK, US, Canada and Australia of specific interventions to counter or prevent difficulties in the domains of child development, parenting capacity and wider environmental factors. Many contributions demonstrate the importance of engaging with service users and helping communities to shape and direct their own programmes for change. The final section of the book presents useful approaches to assessing and evaluating services.

Demonstrating the need for close inter-agency collaboration and `joined up' services, this book is essential reading for policy makers, managers and practitioners in child welfare agencies, and social work academics and students.

Chapter 1

Safeguarding and Promoting
the Well-being of Children,
Families and Communities

Harriet Ward and Jane Scott

Despite their affluence, Western societies nevertheless experience difficulties in safeguarding and promoting the well-being of vulnerable children. This book uses examples from Australia, Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom to explore evidence of need and its consequences; the effectiveness of policies aimed at reducing need; and specific interventions which seek to address those factors within children, their families and their communities that prevent them from achieving a satisfactory standard of health and well-being. Methodologies for routinely monitoring the outcomes of interventions are also discussed.

Introduction

The definition of ‘well-being’ used in this book draws from the work of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Acknowledged as ‘the most universally embraced human rights treaty in history’, and ratified, acceded to or signed by 192 countries, the Convention specifies a comprehensive set of legal standards for safeguarding and promoting the well-being of children. The Millennium Development Goals (1990–2003) translate these standards into specific targets that can be monitored to demonstrate how far well-being is achieved: these include reducing poverty and child mortality rates and increasing literacy. Later documents reiterate the commitment to the Convention and describe how children’s well-being will be safeguarded and promoted by creating a ‘world fit for children’ in which ‘all children get the best possible start in life’ and all ‘have ample opportunity to develop their individual capacities in a safe and supportive environment’ (United Nations 2002, p.5).

This book is about safeguarding and promoting the well-being of children in Western societies. Examples are drawn from four English-speaking jurisdictions: Australia, Canada, the United States of America and the United Kingdom. One might assume that these societies are all sufficiently wealthy to ensure that the Millennium Goals have all long since been met, but this is manifestly not the case. Over three million children in Great Britain are currently living below the poverty line (Department for Work and Pensions 2003a); 388,200 are defined under the Children Act 1989 as unable to achieve or maintain their full potential without the provision of services (Department for Education and Skills 2003a); 37,900 are looked after away from home because of abuse or neglect (Department for Education and Skills 2003b). There is similar evidence of need in Canada, where there were an estimated 61,201 substantiated child maltreatment investigations in 1998 (Trocmé et al. 2001), in Australia, where the life expectancy of the indigenous population is twenty years below that of the majority culture (Clare and Noonan 2002), and in the US, where 4.3 million (11%) children have no health insurance (National Center for Health Statistics 2003). The purpose of this book is to explore how the well-being of these children can be better safeguarded and promoted by initiatives that address those factors that make it harder for them to achieve a satisfactory standard of health and development.

A world fit for children

The United Nations describes a world fit for children as one in which ‘We will promote the physical, psychological, spiritual, social, emotional, cognitive and cultural development of children as a matter of national and global priorities’ (United Nations 2002, p.5). The designated areas where action is needed to bring this world into being are identified as: promoting healthy lives; providing good quality education; protecting against abuse, exploitation and violence; and combating HIV/AIDS. Similar objectives and action areas form an essential component of policies designed to safeguard and promote the well-being of children in all signatories to the UN Convention.

The well-being of children cannot be promoted in isolation, for they will not flourish unless their needs are met both by parents, or other primary carers, and by the environment in which they live. This book is therefore about promoting the well-being of families and communities as well as that of children. While ‘the primary responsibility for the protection, upbringing and development of children rests with the family’ (United Nations 2002, p.5) it is also acknowledged that parents, families and legal guardians require support and assistance from institutions of society. All children will require support from universal services, such as education and health; some will need extra help in achieving well-being through targeted and specialist services, such as speech therapy or emotional and behavioural programmes. Some adults will be unable to nurture children sufficiently to promote their well-being because of problems which diminish parenting capacity, such as poor mental health or substance abuse; others may be impeded by family and environmental factors such as poor housing or a hostile neighbourhood. Still others will encounter difficulties in a combination of these domains. It may therefore prove more appropriate and effective to provide services aimed at supporting parents and/or wider communities rather than focusing solely on the children themselves.

In the UK considerable attention has been devoted to constructing conceptual frameworks that facilitate social workers’ assessments of children’s needs and progress across a range of developmental dimensions. A number of chapters of this book refer to the Looking After Children initiative, a comprehensive methodology for gathering information, identifying needs, making plans and assessing outcomes for children looked after away from home. Key features of this initiative are that outcomes are measured across a spectrum of seven dimensions of children’s development: health, education, identity, family and social relationships, emotional and behavioural development, social presentation and self care skills; that the progress of all children, including the most vulnerable, towards age-specific goals is compared with that of their peers so that deficits can be identified and addressed; and that children’s progress is firmly linked to the quality of care that they receive. The materials developed to support this initiative have now been adapted for use in many parts of Western and Eastern Europe, and implemented with varying degrees of success in several countries, including the UK, Canada and much of Australia.

The Framework for the Assessment of Children in Need and their Families (Department of Health, Department for Education and Skills and Home Office 2000) builds on this initiative to construct a comprehensive map to help social workers gather information about children and families that facilitates the identification and assessment of need. The seven key dimensions of children’s development that form the focus of Looking After Children are complemented by six dimensions of parenting capacity (stability, basic care, ensuring safety, emotional warmth, stimulation, guidance and boundaries), and seven key family and environmental factors (community resources, social integration, income, employment, housing, wider family, family history and functioning). By focusing on the interplay between these domains and dimensions, practitioners should be able to identify those factors within the child, the parents or the wider environment that support or inhibit the achievement of well-being. Materials from this system are designed to help social workers identify and understand need. After gathering information in each of these domains, they are more likely to conclude that a combination of services that address factors within the parents and the environment as well as the child might provide appropriate interventions to meet children’s needs.

The Assessment Framework has been implemented throughout England and Wales; it is also being piloted in Australia, Canada and Sweden. In Britain it has been linked to the Looking After Children project to form a comprehensive system for assessment, planning, intervention and review for all children in need (see Chapter 17). With increased integration of services the interface with other assessment programmes used by professionals who undertake related work in heath, education and the criminal justice system is also being explored (see Cleaver et al. forthcoming; Jones, Chant and Ward 2003). Similar programmes to gather and report on information that facilitates the identification of need and the assessment of outcomes are being implemented in parts of the US (see Chapters 16 and 17).

Our understanding of the process of identifying need and assessing outcomes has advanced considerably over the last decade or so; we are also clearer about the consequences of unmet need. Cleaver, Unell and Aldgate’s (1999) review of the impact of parental problems such as mental illness, domestic violence and drug abuse on children’s development; Tomison’s (1996) work on the relationship between child maltreatment and mental disorder; and Knapp’s (2000) work on the long-term costs of persistent behaviour problems are among many studies that have contributed to improved understanding of the rationale for interventions.

However, while information about need and its consequences is improving, we still know little about the effectiveness of specific interventions (see Law and Joughin 2005; Macdonald 2001). This book aims to advance the discussion in this area by exploring a number of initiatives that are intended to improve children’s well-being by addressing potential or actual difficulties within the three domains of child development, parenting capacity and the family and environment. These are all programmes that have been introduced in the UK, Canada, Australia or the US, some on a national and some on a local basis. All the chapters provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of the initiatives they describe. We do not know how successfully specific interventions can be transplanted from one society to another, but there are sufficient similarities within the cultures of these jurisdictions to assume that the lessons learned from evaluating these programmes would be of value to a wide range of practitioners, policy makers and researchers who seek to safeguard and promote the well-being of children, families and communities in any of these societies.

Reducing poverty

The inter-relationship between need and poverty is one of the primary issues to be addressed in any attempt to safeguard and promote well-being:

Chronic poverty remains the single biggest obstacle to meeting the needs, protecting and promoting the rights of children. It must be tackled on all fronts, from the provision of basic social services to the creation of employment opportunities, from the availability of microcredit to investment in infrastructure, and from debt relief to fair trade practices. Children are hardest hit by poverty because it strikes at the very roots of their potential for development – their growing bodies and minds. (United Nations 2002, p.5)

As both Chapters 2 and 12 point out, in affluent countries of the industrialized world there are no valid excuses for child poverty, yet all the four societies reflected in this book are marked by substantial inequalities, with large numbers of children being brought up on insufficient incomes. In Chapter 2, Bennett spells out the consequences for children of being brought up in poverty, both in terms of their current childhood experiences and the long-term impact into adulthood. Poverty does indeed strike at the very roots of children’s well-being, affecting their health, their cognitive development, their educational opportunities and their self-esteem. Bennett explores the link between poverty and social exclusion, demonstrating how insufficient family income restricts children’s opportunities for social interactions and prevents families from participating fully in the life of their community. In Chapter 14 Leslie adds a further dimension to this discussion, tracing the links between poverty, poor housing and child abuse.

Far-reaching issues such as poverty are largely structural, and should primarily be addressed through broad scale government policy agendas. National initiatives introduced by the New Labour government in Britain, with the aim of eradicating child poverty in twenty years and halving it in ten, have tackled the issue on a number of fronts and form an integral part of the government’s policy agenda for children and families. However, while the programmes have achieved considerable success in some areas (see Chapters 2 and 3) concerns have been raised at proposals to make entitlement to income conditional on particular behaviours (see Chapter 2).

The key question is whether coercive measures, such as conditionality of income, improve well-being. The American programme of welfare-to-work, intended to reduce poverty and dependency and increase employment, income and self-esteem by encouraging parents back to work is explored in Chapter 4. While there have been some positive findings relating to improved incentives for employment, and more interest from family-friendly employers, the programme has failed to take account of the absence of stable employment opportunities, the low earning potential of most participants and their need for transitional arrangements if they join the workforce. As a result, families have tended to move off welfare but not out of poverty, with damaging consequences for children’s (and parents’) well-being.

Promoting the well-being of parents and children

While addressing poverty is a core requirement in promoting children’s wellbeing, there are many other areas to be addressed on both a national and a local basis.

The United Nations acknowledges a commitment to: ‘recognise and support parents and families or, as the case may be, legal guardians as the primary caretakers of children...[and] strengthen their capacity to provide the optimum care, nurturing and protection’ (United Nations 2002, p.2). Supporting parents is also high on the British government agenda. A major research programme to identify the type of support that parents find helpful and the ways in which it can best be delivered is described in Chapter 10. Findings from many of the studies discussed in this chapter have formed the basis for policy development in this area.

Physical and mental health problems, misuse of drugs and alcohol, domestic violence and social exclusion are among the many reasons why some parents find it difficult to provide children with a sufficiently nurturing environment. Such parents may require extra help in accessing universal services such as ante-natal care or early years education. They may also benefit from more focused specialist services. Programmes such as Head Start in the US and Canada (Chapter 7) and Sure Start in the UK (Chapter 3) focus on at risk populations with the aim of breaking negative cycles of deprivation and disadvantage by offering early childhood development Program to parents and very young children. The Canada Pre-Natal Nutrition Program (Chapter 11) offers intensive support to pregnant women in at risk groups to improve their opportunities of achieving well-being both for themselves and their children.

Such intensive programmes can bring positive results. One of the individual studies in the Canadian federal programme found that there were significant ben...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Of Related Interest
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1. Safeguarding and Promoting the Well-being of Children, Families and Communities
• Part I Evidence of Need
• Part II Effective Interventions to Promote Children’s Health and Well-being
• Part III Promoting the Well-being of Vulnerable Families
• Part IV Promoting the Well-being of Vulnerable Communities
• Part V Conclusion
• Glossary
• References
• The Contributors
• Subject Index
• Author Index