Toolkit for alcohol workers
Parenting capacity
We are not, via this toolkit, asking alcohol workers to become childcare or parenting experts. However it may help - in carrying out the limited role that we are suggesting is the duty of alcohol workers - to understand the basic principles of parenting that have emerged from research in this field.
Of vital importance to a child’s health and development is the ability of parents or carers to ensure that a child’s developmental needs are being appropriately and adequately met. This ability, or ‘parenting capacity’ as it is professionally named, can be illustrated by a number of features that cover the wide range of essential parenting tasks:
Basic care – Providing for a child’s physical needs, like food, drink, warmth, shelter, clean and appropriate clothing and adequate personal hygiene. It also covers appropriate medical and dental care.
Ensuring safety – Ensuring that a child is adequately protected from harm or danger. It includes protecting a child from significant harm or danger, contact with unsafe adults/other children, and self harm. Also relates to awareness and protection form hazards and danger both in the home and elsewhere.
Emotional warmth – Ensuring that a child’s emotional needs are met and that the child has a sense of being specially valued and has a positive send of own racial and cultural identity. It includes ensuring that a child has secure, stable and affectionate relationships with significant adults who are appropriately sensitive and responsive to the child’s needs. It also means that children receive appropriate physical contact, comfort and cuddling that is sufficient to demonstrate warm regard, praise and encouragement.
Stimulation – Promoting a child’s learning and intellectual development through encouragement, cognitive simulation and social opportunities. This covers interacting with children, communication, talking, responding to the child’s language and questions, encouraging and joining in play, promoting and ensuring educational opportunities.
Guidance and boundaries – The key parental tasks here are demonstrating and modelling appropriate behaviour and control of emotions and interactions with others so that the child is able to develop an internal model of moral values, conscience and social behaviours appropriate for the society in which they grow. It includes not over protecting children, social problem solving, anger management, consideration for others, effective discipline and shaping of behaviour.
Stability – providing a sufficiently stable family environment to enable a child to develop and maintain secure attachment to the primary caregivers. Includes secure attachments not being disrupted, providing consistent emotional warmth, responding to behaviour in the same way. In addition, ensuring children keep in contact with important family members and significant others.
It is important to realise that when a parent is experiencing their own problems which affect their behaviour (like drinking problematically for example) then this may adversely affect their capacity to respond to their children’s needs. It is also important to distinguish between an adult’s aspirations and intentions as a parent, and the daily reality of their behaviour and responses in this role. When assessing parenting capacity, observation of interactions between parents and children is as critically important as the way they are described by the adults involved.
Other dimensions of a child’s developmental needs that are equally as essential as parenting capacity are family and environmental factors. This covers how it functions in terms of close relationships and the wider family, as well as housing, employment, income, social integrations and use of community resources. Thinking of children and families in this wider context acknowledges that the care and upbringing of children does not take place in a vacuum and families are affected by the wider family, neighbourhood and social networks in which they live.
In terms of problem drinking by parents, this is often characterised by a lack of guidance and boundaries for children, and an inconsistent and unpredictable parenting style.
Further information on parenting capacity can be found at a number of sources, but a good starting point would be the National Family and Parenting Institute www.nfpi.org.uk
Other sources to look at would be:
SureStart www.surestart.gov.uk
NSPCC www.nspcc.org.uk
The government’s parenting website www.parentscentre.gov.uk
