January 30, 2012 in Family, Recession
This is our latest guide for parents facing financial hardship, because of the recession or for any other reason. If you are a parent or a young person in a family that is struggling then this short guide is for you, written by Deidre Sanders, Agony Aunt of The Sun.
Tell us what you think of the guide – add a comment below.
If you want to order a copy, email us on hardtimes [at] kidsinthemiddle.org.uk.
January 30, 2012 in Relationships, Separation, Services
Family separation affects children in many ways, some that are not readily apparent until later in life when children become parents themselves. In the UK, where the divorce and separation rate remains high, perhaps its time to change the way we help families to deal with the aftermath of separation.
The children who do best after separation are those whose parents can disentangle the ending of their adult relationship from their ongoing parenting relationship. This ability to continue to parent together provides for children the continuity and certainty of a close relationship with mum and dad, which in turn provides the foundation for successful adult relationships in the future. But too many parents who are separating find themselves so caught up in their own pain and suffering that their children’s needs are simply overlooked.
To makes things worse the support that is available to separating parents is often responsible for increasing the conflict between them. Many organisations encourage the notion that one parent has control over the children, viewing the other as an optional extra, or argue that both parents should have equal rights to their children’s time. Neither of these approaches help parents to work together to give their children the love, care and support that is so essential to their well being.
We should instead set an expectation that both parents will continue to be fully involved in their children’s lives after separation and invest in services to support that. These services should not just be about reducing conflict but about helping children to feel secure in a model of close, positive parenting that they will be able to draw upon when they become parents themselves.
Services to support the rebuilding of parenting partnerships are delivered widely in other countries (for example Australia) but remain rare and underfunded in the UK. The Centre for Separated Families offers support to both parents at the point of separation and beyond, helping separated mums and dads to build better relationships. This approach is not a quick fix. But the investment is worth it because the research shows that when parents can rebuild a working partnership their children will benefit for the rest of their lives.
We believe that the time has come to move from focusing upon adult rights to supporting parental responsibilities, and to invest in more services that reorientate parents towards the needs of their children. It is time for those who develop policy to think differently about what is really needed for children. This is not just about helping children now, but about investing in the future.
January 30, 2012 in Recession, Relationships
Everyone says the recession has been, and is continuing to be, a disaster for families. Credit is being crunched, jobs are being lost and family charities report an increase in calls as the pressure and stress of money worries leads to a significant rise in family conflict. But is that the whole picture?
Some political butt has been kicked for daring to suggest there may be an upside to the situation. It’s usually true that anyone pontificating on the nobility of poverty speaks from the right side of the manor wall. It’s very easy to wax lyrical on the opportunities afforded by redundancy when your job is copper bottomed and gold plated. But hey – I’ve been there. In fact, I’m still there so maybe I do have the right to say having to tighten belts can have some interesting and indeed highly positive aspects.
You see, from my POV and IMHO, being cash rich and time poor has far more devastating effects on family life than the other way round. I’d say the worst influences on family life today are the things we’ve got accustomed to from a consumer society – stuff like chill-cook prepared meals, a tv, dvd, laptop and games console in every bedroom, the fast-forward, wired up, networking society. Oh yeah, I facebook and twitter with the best of them. But when my family are there, we eat together, chat together, watch films together; hell, we even take baths together (ok – husband only included in that….).
Six months ago I had an email from a man who had lost his job and felt he’d lost any entitlement to being a real father – a father and a parent, after all, being someone who could care for his family. We discussed other definitions of father and parenthood, and other ways of caring and he came up with quite a catalogue of things his children said they missed out on when he had been in fulltime work So here’s the question; with less money and more time, what upsides could you find?
January 30, 2012 in Family, Separation
Kids In The Middle is about helping children who get caught up in relationship problems at home and about helping parents to avoid these problems in the first place.
With 25 Agony Aunts and Uncles backing the campaign, and a coalition of 24 national organisations teaming up to make change happen, Kids in the Middle can think big. What do you think Kids in the Middle should campaign for?
The members of the campaign have had a discussion about this and our ideas are below. We now want to hear from you about your thoughts. You may be a child, or a mother or father or other member of a family, or someone who has had a good or a bad experience of a family service. You might be someone who works for an organisation that helps children and families.
(This is a discussion about campaigns and we cannot answer personal enquiries. If you have those, why not try one of the Agony Aunts and Uncles listed in the “about us” section? You can contact them through their newspapers and magazines.)
We will join in the discussion so if you have questions, please ask them. If you want to follow what we do, please subscribe to this website – we will keep telling you what we are up to on this website.
So, our ideas so far……
Some time ago I watched a charming and strikingly communicative child change completely when her parents went through a pretty messy divorce. What was most worrying was how conflict and anxieties spread around the child’s circle of friends, only resolved (for the friends) when the child suddenly moved out of the school. The school did its best, but this was clearly beyond what the teachers had the capacity and time to deal with. This child needed help – particularly help to keep her friendships intact through the turmoil at home. It was actually this situation that first made me think that we need a new service, perhaps a helpline or counselling that is specifically promoted in schools and is promoted to children who are having trouble at home.
So we are thinking about two ideas. First something like an Agony Aunt or Uncle for school children, that they could write to or email. There are some organisations that provide this help already, but no-one that is so well known that most children all over the country know about him or her when people are fighting at home. We also think that every school in England should have a counsellor – someone that children in trouble can speak to privately. In Wales, all schools must have a counsellor – why not in the rest of the UK?
In some families there is violence, and some children end up having to move out of the home and away from their school because of it. We think children subjected to violence in their own home deserve a LOT of help and more than they get now.
For parents who are separating or divorcing, we think there need to be better services that help both mum and dad to deal with their extreme upset, to help them rebuild their roles as mum and dad separately instead of together. We don’t think the child’s point of view is taken seriously enough in many cases – not because people don’t think that children are important, but because the systems we have just make it really difficult to hear the children.
We think family and children’s services should give more support and better support to parents who are fighting a lot and also support to parents who are parenting apart from each other. We also think there needs to be more support on-line, so parents have immediate access to help when they are worried, even in the middle of the night!
We think much more attention should be given to how parents get along and how this affects children, starting at the birth. We think maternity services need to do more to work with both parents together when a baby is born, helping them to work together and to cope with the massive change a baby makes to the relationship between them.
We think that all children’s services and family services should be able to give parents relationship support – we need to work hard to make it feel “OK” for parents to ask for such help.
We also think schools should teach more about social and emotional issues, because these are so fundamental to everyone’s happiness and success. We don’t think this is given very much priority, given how important it is.
January 30, 2012 in Family, Services
It is a well worn cliché that our children are our future but the decisions we make now will have repercussions in the long term, not just for them, but for us all. Action for Children and nef (the new economics foundation) have set out in the report Backing the Future what level of investment in what interventions need to be put in place to bring the UK out of its nadir, languishing at the bottom of nearly every European league table for preventable social problems – crime, mental ill health, family breakdown, drug use and obesity – into a place where children feel loved, are free from poverty, have supportive relationships and feel happy and safe.
With the recession biting it is as hard as ever to win support for a new way of going about investing in children. But the recession makes it even more important that we seize this opportunity to invest in services that work for our children and young people. That is exactly what Backing the Future recommends – that we invest in effective and efficient services that support a change in emphasis from spending on acute services to prioritising early intervention in order to address preventable social problems.
We found that if inefficient spending continues the cost to the UK economy of dealing with social problems could reach as much as £4 trillion over the next 20 years without addressing the root cause of the problems – dwarfing the overall cost of the MPs’ expenses scandal which has taken up so many column inches. The rewards of instead spending money now are compelling: a 10-year investment of £191 billion in targeted interventions such as working with families to keep children out of the care system, or improving parenting skills, will deliver a net return of £269 billion. This support for the most vulnerable should be accompanied by an investment of £428 billion in universal childcare and paid parental leave, which will deliver a net return of £606 billion over 20 years and eventually render many of the targeted interventions unnecessary.
With the recession continuing to hit the most vulnerable in society hardest, providing politicians with hard evidence as to how to get the most bang for the tax payer’s buck is an important first step to reshaping the way we invest in our children and breaking the cycle of disadvantage.
We know intuitively that picking problems up early is best but the key to achieving policy change is to lift barriers that for too long have created a bar to investment and implementation. This is the major challenge confronting politicians and, ultimately, us all.
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