Who's Fit to be a Parent?

Mukti Jain Campion

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134918997
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Medical Theory, Practice & Reference

In recent years the notion of parenting and parenthood have increasingly come under examination from the media and professionals and, in particular, government and politicians. More and more, parents are being held to account by society for their failure to deliver the sort of citizens it wants. But what are parents supposed to be doing? Are there some people that are inherently unfit to be parents and does there exist a body of knowledge that defines fit parenting?
Who's fit to be a parent? covers this highly topical and important subject in a stimulating and accessible way that cuts across numerous professional disciplines and opens up the boundaries between professional and personal expertise on parenting.
It is essential reading for any professional or student of social work and social policy, those working in the voluntary services concerned with the family, social policy makers and for anyone interested in understanding what it means to be a parent today.

Part I

Parents on trial

There are now a growing number of people who require the approval of others to be allowed to become, or to remain, parents. Over the past century, the state has been drawn increasingly, but somewhat reluctantly, into family life, driven by the public’s conscience to protect children’s right to minimum care but also by the economic expediency of trying to prevent delinquency, crime and adult ill health. As more children become the responsibility of the state, a body of welfare professionals has developed– notably doctors, social workers, health visitors, child psychiatrists and court welfare officers. These act as a buffer zone between the state and the family, carrying out family intervention under the state’s legal and political guidance, but largely defining their own guidelines.

One of their key roles has become that of assessing families, in particular whether certain adults are able to provide the right sort of parenting to their existing children or to children in the future. In Part I, I will examine the four key situations in which the assessment of parents takes place: child protection, adoption, childcare after the break-up of the parental relationship, and the provision of treatment for medically assisted reproduction. These four areas may be likened to the four facets of a pyramid-like edifice, constructed piecemeal by the state to regulate parenthood, at least to the extent of protecting some children. I would like to examine the exposed faces of this pyramid but also try and uncover any common ideological base on which it rests. Thus in each of these four ‘practical’ areas, I will examine who carries out the assessment of parents, what criteria they use and what they tell us about the expectations of all parents. The aim is to see how much consensus exists about who is fit to be a parent and to see how consistently and effectively the assessment processes safeguard the interests of children–and their parents.

1

The state versus parents

Children into care

The British media recently reported the case of a reclusive mother and son who were found living in a squalid house in suburbia, surrounded by neglected and dying pets. The 11 year old boy was described as never having attended school and as having no contact with other children, but

despite her problems, the mother seems to have lavished attention on him acting as a teacher as well as a mother and friend. Social workers were astonished to find him articulate, literate and numerate. Poised and well-spoken, he has not necessarily suffered lasting damage from his strange childhood.

(Margaret Driscoll, Sunday Times 1/12/91)

The media also pursued the question of who was to blame for not intervening to save the boy from his circumstances.

The social workers argued that no one had reported his predicament to them, so how were they supposed to help?–‘We rely heavily on intervention by schools or the community to trigger our work’.

Neighbours saw no reason to pry: ‘The boy looked plump and healthy. If he had been starved or bruised, well, that would have been different. But people live the way they want to live. You can’t interfere’.

(Margaret Driscoll, Sunday Times 1/12/91)

The media reports focused on the boy as a victim of his mother’s irrational behaviour, describing him as a captive in their relationship. An independent social worker summed up her initial assessment of the boy thus:

It will certainly have done him some harm, in that he does not seem to have had peer relationships or the ability to play. The crucial thing is the relationship with his mother, if she had managed to keep it unintense, then he may develop quite normally. The problem is that it is probably a very intense relationship because there was just the two of them.

At the time of writing this chapter, the mother and son were ‘being kept under observation at a special unit while social workers gently try to prise apart the roots of their mutual dependency’.

The way the story was reported highlights some of the expectations western society currently has of normal parents and the normal childhood to which all children should be entitled–parents should adequately nourish and physically care for their children, they should send them to school, the children should mix and play with children of their own age and have non-intense relationships with sociable parents who conform to society’s standards of normal behaviour. The reports also highlight the role of the ‘community’, e.g. neighbours, teachers and social workers, in monitoring parents so that ‘unfit’ parenting can be identified and dealt with in order to protect children. It assumes they have the knowledge and skills to do so.

This monitoring of parents is notoriously haphazard and this is what I would like to examine in this chapter. The state’s role in protecting children reveals the most about the minimum standards that ‘fit’ parents are expected to meet. The assessment of children at risk in their own families is concerned with identifying whether the parents are good enough to keep their children. So the question is: At what point do good enough parents cease to be good enough? The answer seems to be: at the point when their fitness to parent is called into question, observations made and criteria applied to see whether they pass the parenting test, and then a decision is taken as to whether they can retain possession of their children–or whether the children should be ‘taken into care’ (the very phrase emphasises the notion that parents have been care-less towards their children to have reached this point).

What criteria are applied in assessing whether parents are fit to care for their own children? Are these criteria based on widely accepted knowledge? Are they applied consistently and fairly? Are parents aware of how they are being assessed? Are they offered appropriate resources to improve their abilities to be fit parents? How much freedom should the state have to come between parents and their children? What are the underlying philosophies that are being represented when professionals intervene?

These are all questions which have not been openly explored or debated in the public arena. The result has been that society makes ill-considered demands on those professionals at the sharp end of policy implementation. Perhaps even more significant, we may not be giving all children an equal opportunity to be helped when their own families are unable or unwilling to care for them. For professionals to be seen to be getting the balance right, there needs to be a clearer consensus from society at large about what defines adequate parenting and what justifies state intervention.

To understand the state’s current attitudes to who is fit to be a parent we need to begin by looking back into the brief history of state intervention into family life.

A HISTORY OF CHILD PROTECTION BY THE STATE

Children embody all that is pure, innocent and hopeful in our society. Whether or not we are parents, when this is corrupted it undermines all that gives stability, meaning and purpose to our own adult lives. It offends our sense of what is right and just. Modern society is easily horrified by the extremes of physical and sexual abuse of young children, particularly when it is inflicted by parents. Yet society has conflicting expectations of the professionals that intervene. The almost daily reports of battered children whom the social workers could not protect focus on the plight of the vulnerable young suffering at the hands of hapless dregs of adult society, because the social workers have been too optimistic about their parents’ natural love.

In contrast, the British media coverage of the social workers’ responses to the alleged sexual abuse of children in Cleveland, Rochdale and the Orkneys in recent years focused almost exclusively on the plight of the parents and the horror of having children removed. Public sympathy see-saws between parents and children with little consistency because there exists an underlying conflict of social philosophies about whether children are the property of their parents or whether they are individuals with rights.

Freedom of the individual is paramount, and that extends to bringing up children as that individual wishes. This is endorsed by the European Bill of Human Rights, Clause 8:

1 Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.

2 There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health and morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.

The state should protect those who are vulnerable. Children cannot determine and safeguard their own interests, and since the young are the builders of future society we all share a responsibility to protect them.

All too often it becomes a case of parents versus children. In the past there was no doubt whom the state backed: children were regarded as the property of the father. The father was even entitled to compensation for loss of the child’s earnings if the child died in the hands of his employer or foster parents.

Even the principle that parents are responsible for every child born to them is a relatively recent one. As John Boswell described in his book The Kindness of Strangers, the abandonment of children was a common and acceptable feature of life over most of western history. For example, in his discussion of the widespread practice of abandonment in Roman times he writes:

Even Hierocles’ ideal parent might only bring up ‘most’ of his children and hence would abandon some. Most ancient moral writings evince indifference toward or acceptance of abandonment. Gellius, who excoriates abortion as an act ‘worthy of public contempt and general hatred’ and even rails against the evils of mothers not nursing their own children, mentions abandonment as a common or normal occurrence without any suggestion of disapproval.

(Boswell 1991)

The only reason children came into the public arena in the past was because they were abandoned, usually as a method of family planning (for reasons of poverty or desire to maximise the inheritance for a few offspring).

Their fate was left to the whim of individuals: they were exposed in public locations in the central city without any supervision or civic intervention, and no effort was made to regulate their treatment or to guarantee their well-being. But they were gathered up, generally survived to adulthood, reared as children as often as kept for slaves and frequently achieved considerable success in life, often marrying into their adoptive families. Society relied on the kindness of strangers to protect its extra children, a kindness much admired and prominent in the public consciousness.

(Boswell 1991)

There was no suggestion of the state intervening to remove children from their parents for the welfare of the children themselves, but none the less, Boswell argues, the children did better than when, 1,500 years later, the state,

too conscientious to leave the fate of unwanted children to chance, and too preoccupied with family ties and lineage to admire affective solutions, intervened to establish an orderly public means of handling them… In Renaissance cities the infants disappeared quietly and efficiently through the revolving doors of state-run foundling homes, out of sight and out of mind, into social oblivion, or more likely death by disease.

(Boswell 1991)

This was the fate of unwanted infants. The move away from agricultural communities to urban isolation and poverty considerably increased the problem of child exploitation and of child destitution and it was these abandoned children who prompted philanthropic individuals and church groups to set up schemes providing such children with homes where they could be corrected by strict moral guidance and vocational training. There was a strongly moralistic line pursued against those parents who allowed their children to become destitute, as poverty and criminality were still seen by many as self-inflicted–a sign of weakness of character and poor stock.

But what of the children who were inadequately cared for by parents who had chosen to keep them? It seems that the beginning of state intervention into family life did not occur until the mid-nineteenth century when individual philanthropists revealed the horrors to which children were subjected in factories and workhouses. Pressure from individuals and voluntary groups led to laws making it illegal for children to work more than a certain number of hours and required them to receive a certain amount of schooling. That the prospect of such laws met with considerable opposition at the time reflects the economic importance of children to parents and to the state (as cheap labour for the factories and mines) but also the strong belief in parents’ ownership of their children. This was further emphasised by the acknowledgements of many reformers of the need to protect the sanctity of the family.

In a quotation that has chillingly taken on new significance in the light of modern stories of nannies abusing children of working mothers, Ruth Inglis writes:

Another ‘reformer’, Whately Cooke Taylor in 1874 invoked the sanctity of family life when questioned by followers as to why strong legislation had not been passed to help reduce the high infant mortality rate. While he conceded that there was a connection between the high death rate and the phenomenon of mothers leaving their babies unsupervised while they went out to work, he proclaimed, ‘I would far rather see even a higher rate of infant mortality prevailing…than intrude one iota further on the sanctity of the domestic hearth’.

(Inglis 1978)

This reluctance to interfere with the authority of parents was an indication of how irrelevant the notion of children’s rights was at the time. Much of the initial support for children had been driven by the desire to wipe out destitution, but in the last three decades of the nineteenth century there appears to have been a distinct shift towards considering children as individuals with some rights in terms other than simply preventing them from turning to crime or prostitution.

The media played a role ev...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Who’s Fit to Be a Parent?
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Parents on trial
• Part II Parents on the edge
• Part III The job description
• Bibliography
• Index