Generando principios para las directivas docentes Hacia la equidad de género

“We would reconnect communities so they could move from the ‘I’ to the ‘we’. We are herd dwellers and were never meant to live in isolation. Too many communities are disconnected and families are living in isolation and this leaves our youngest and most precious at risk of their potential not being reached. Something that none of us can afford to continue to gamble with” (Trish Hunt, 2008).

I.

Introduction

Many assume that the ability to parent is innate and one which somehow automatically surfaces when people give birth (Qu and Weston, 2009). But each time the newspaper headlines report a death of a child due to abuse or unintentional injury we are reminded in dramatic fashion that sadly this is not so. Many of those working with families see children on a daily basis suffering poor outcomes because of neglect, poor attachment or because they live in chaotic homes, often with family violence. This provides a reminder that many people, often parenting in isolation, are finding it more and more difficult to connect with others in their communities to learn effective parenting skills. The worry is that with each successive generation, poor parenting practices are being passed on to the detriment of a large number of young New Zealanders and the country’s future.

Governments and social agencies are struggling to find ways to fill the gaps left by the erosion of traditional community support for parents and the passing on of parenting knowledge. One response has been to look to parenting education programmes to help. Although the literature shows that parenting education is beneficial for parents, it also shows that it does not meet the needs of all parents – usually those who need it most. There is a concern that an unreasonable expectation has been placed on what has been essentially a middle class activity to address everyone’s needs. There is a sense that many programmes are failing at this task and that many are wasteful of time, money and resources.

There is evidence that programmes are failing to provide long-term benefits because they are universal programmes with standardised curriculum which have not been developed within communities or in consultation with the parents they are meant to be benefit. Often these

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programmes try a simple, single approach to complex problems, usually by providing a course offered over a finite number of weeks in isolation from any other multiple or ongoing means of support.

The New Zealand Government announced in 2009 it intended to spend $45 million on ‘sending’ 12,000 parents of violent or misbehaving school children to attend the Incredible Years programme throughout the country (Beaumont, 2009). On the face of it, this appears to repeating the mistakes of old. The programme is developed in the United States of America, has a fixed length and a set curriculum and has not been developed with the people it is intended for. Will parents somehow be mandated to attend? Will there be any attempt to embed the programme within communities and provide ongoing and other forms of support? Given that research by Mockford and Barlow (2004) shows that parenting education is more effective for parents earlier in their parenthood than later, is it wise to target the parents of school-aged children rather than parents of very young children? Will it be yet another expensive plan with only limited benefits?

In my work, I had a salutary lesson in the inadvisability of this approach. I had asked a facilitator to consult with the community in a small, provincial town with a largely Māori population with the aim of offering a series of free short-term parenting education courses. In turning the offer down, the community told the facilitator they were ‘sick of having strangers come in with no knowledge of the community, deliver the programme and then leave never to be seen again’.

This study began because there was no clear picture about the critical elements necessary for parenting education to succeed – particularly those elements which would ensure successful attendance, retention and positive learning outcomes for parents, particularly from ‘hard-to-reach’ families.

Findings showed that despite different approaches, all three programmes in this research had beneficial outcomes for parents in the short-term and probably, given the transformational change that took place for some, in the long-term too. Not only that, it showed these programmes had overcome problems commonly reported in the literature by other parenting education programmes. This chapter explores the reasons for this.

II.

Critical elements for successful programmes

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1. The importance of the programmes being embedded in the communities in multiple ways 2. The supportive nature of groups

3. The importance of the facilitator’s role.

4. Content that transformed the parents’ view of the child (helped parents see children from the viewpoint of the child, rather than that of the adult).

5. Content that helped parents link their parenting practices to their own upbringing.