BUSINESS
8 |
drinkanddrugsnews
| April 2012
Cover story |
Family support
www.drinkanddrugsnews.com
‘W
hoever you talk to you’ll get a different view of what family
support means,’ said Adfam’s chief executive Vivienne
Evans, opening the charity’s recent conference, Family
support: everybody’s business? ‘The number of families
affected is certainly not going down,’ she said. ‘Often the
numbers are eye watering and those are just the ones we know about – so
much is hidden.’
Dr Katherine Rake, chief executive of the Family and Parenting Institute, gave
perspective on the scale of support needed. In England alone there were
117,000 families that had been identified as having ‘multiple problems’. With
the cost of intervention projects at around £14,000 per family, it was clear that
spending restraints would have an impact.
But she identified a challenge to service delivery. ‘Specific needs flow from
specific vulnerabilities, but our tools tend to be generic,’ she said. People should
also be careful with concepts of intergenerational transmission, and ‘the media
rhetoric of a generation of neglectful parents’, which were not reflected in the
evidence.
‘What we know is that parenting style matters dramatically in influencing how
children turn out. But poor parenting runs across social class and all parents
struggle at some point,’ she said. ‘Everybody thinks there’s some magic
blueprint that’s slightly out of reach of them – parents feel demonised.’
There were two streams of policy emerging, she said – one to boost parents’
capacity through information and practical support; the other aimed at reducing
parenting pressures through initiatives such as the government’s new Social
Justice Strategy, which stressed the importance of early interventions.
‘We need to recognise that supporting families and parents is not a luxury
item,’ said Rake. ‘It’s central to both a healthy society and economy.’
‘The danger is that we buy into the tabloid picture of intergenerational
substance misuse,’ said Karen Biggs, chief executive of Phoenix Futures.
‘Tabloids present a story where addiction plagues the most deprived, but I don’t
want our children to believe they’re a victim of their heritage. If addiction is a
disease then surely it can be passed from generation to generation. ‘But we
don’t believe that at Phoenix – we believe you can build a firewall.’
The picture was a complex one, she said. ‘Every one of the 20,000 people
Phoenix treated last year had a unique experience of family.’ Furthermore, many
women hid their addiction through fear of losing their children.
Alison Garnham, chief executive of the Child Poverty Action Group, said a
reverse narrative was developing that wasn’t particularly helpful.
‘The government sees drugs and alcohol as a major cause of poverty, but
the lack of jobs with decent income is the major cause of poverty,’ she said.
‘David Cameron is very ill advised to talk about poor families as causes of
crime and neighbours from hell.’
Policy-driven evidence was replacing evidence-based policy, she said. ‘At best
government policies are enigmatic about what they hope to achieve in terms of
child poverty reduction.’ Proper quantification of the problem should replace
rhetoric, she stressed, highlighting the lack of research on the relationship
between poverty and drug and alcohol use.
‘For children living with alcoholics it can be like living on the edge of a
volcano,’ she said. £18bn worth of benefit cuts and the closure of many advice
agencies would hit the poorest families hardest, with 100,000 more children
set to move into poverty – at a cost of £25bn, according to the Joseph
Rowntree Foundation.
‘A lot of people don’t realise how much more there is to come,’ she said.
‘There’s a health divide, an education divide and a wellbeing divide.’
Jamie Bartlett, senior researcher at the thinktank Demos, explained the links
between parenting and drinking behaviour at different ages, using a quadrant of
parenting styles – ‘laissez faire, tough love, disengaged and authoritarian’, with a
‘tough love’ approach linked to happiness and success in later life.
‘Tough love is really difficult when you have difficult circumstances – you
have to think of a much more holistic approach to family problems,’ he said.
‘But you can produce evidence that services shouldn’t be cut.’
Wendy Weal, chief executive of social enterprise Interface Associates, was
working with the Troubled Families Unit and ‘desperately trying to influence policy’.
‘We need to identify who the right families are – get them on a spreadsheet and
look at who we should be targeting,’ she said. Local authorities were failing to do
this but there was money available for a network of family coordinators.
‘We need to bring together local agencies – police, Jobcentre Plus, health
organisations and schools to put a robust plan of action in place to deal with
families. And we need to track it to make sure the right action is being taken,’ she
said.
Debbie Cowley, chief executive of Action for Prisoners’ Families, gave
feedback from her work improving the wellbeing of offenders’ families.
‘Families are suffering because of the actions of the state,’ she said. An
example of this was tagging, which put family members in the role of warden, at
great cost to family life. Another example was where women were imprisoned
for shoplifting, because their partner had a drug or alcohol problem, ‘making the
effects of drug use on the family far more dangerous. It’s an instant where state
action has a greater effect on the family’.
There were many pressures on the families of prisoners, from losing income
through loss of employment to being pressurised – and sometimes bullied – by
their family member to bring food, clothes, drugs and mobile phones. Searches
of the home were traumatic, and moving prisoners to different establishments
could create immense difficulties with retaining contact, particularly with
children – ‘all things that have a toxic effect on family life’.
Curfewing a person at home could bring its own stresses and be ‘deeply
oppressive’ for the family, particularly if it attracted criminals to the house. ‘The
state’s making families’ lives more difficult. It tips them into a state of needing
help,’ she said.
Sharing information between organisations and agencies would help. ‘You
need to know the kinds of issues these families face, so you are not, like the
state, putting things in their way,’ she said. ‘Then you will help build stronger
families and stronger building blocks for society.’
DDN
‘Supporting families and parents is not a luxury item – it’s central to both a healthy
society and economy,’ said a speaker at Adfam’s conference. It was a sentiment
echoed by speakers from all areas of family support, as DDN reports