Children's Needs – Parenting Capacity - Digital Education Resource ...

1Is concern justified? Problems ofdefinition and prevalenceTo understand whether the present concerns over parental mental illness, learningdisability, problem alcohol and drug use or domestic violence are justified, thischapter examines the problems with terminology and the prevalence of these issues.General population studies provide evidence of their prevalence and the relevanceof gender, culture and class. Findings from child protection research are used toidentify associations between these parental problems and children’s health anddevelopment, including the extent to which they may pose a risk of significantharm to the child.Problems with terminologyUnderstanding the degree of these parental problems is difficult because differentresearch studies use different terms and there are few definitions provided.For example, in the Department of Health’s 1995 studies on child protection(Department of Health 1995a) it is unclear whether Sharland et al.’s (1996) parentswho have ‘relationship problems’ are a similar group to Thoburn et al.’s (1995)parents who are in ‘marital conflict’, or Farmer and Owen’s (1995) families who areexperiencing ‘domestic violence’. Difficulties also arise because, for example, differentcountries use different ways of measuring drug and alcohol use. For instance, the‘unit of alcohol’ in the United Kingdom has little meaning in the US where differentmeasures of alcohol are used in peer-reviewed journals and research. In addition, thepurity of drugs used in different countries may differ. For example, a gram of heroinin New York may be more or less pure than a gram of heroin in London.In discussing the impact of these issues on families, the term ‘parent’ is generallyused in a generic way to refer to any adult responsible for parenting the child. Thusthe mentally ill ‘mother’ could be the birth mother, stepmother, foster mother,father’s female cohabitee or female relative who is bringing up the child. The preciserelationship of the carer to the child has been noted when the findings from researchsuggest this is relevant. Identifying the relationship between the child and parentfigure can be important because it can affect children’s perspectives on events. Forexample, in examining why some children who had witnessed domestic violencewere more resilient than others, Sullivan et al. (2000) found children’s adjustmentwas affected by their relationship to the abuser; stepfathers and father figures weremore emotionally abusive and instilled more fear in the children than birth fathersor non-father figures.