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

Is concern justified? Problems of definition and prevalence 35study found 22% of parents who were subject to care proceedings had a learningdisability. Parental learning disability is frequently identified as one of the manyco-current problems that impact on parents’ capacity to safeguard and promote thewelfare of their children (Cleaver and Freeman 1995; Cleaver and Nicholson 2007).Finally, in an intensive study of 40 serious case reviews 15% of children were livingwith a parent with a learning disability (Brandon et al. 2009).A review of research suggests that between 40% and 60% of parents with learningdisabilities have their children taken into care as a result of court proceedings(McConnell and Llewellyn 2002). A more recent survey of 2,893 people withlearning disabilities in England found of those who were parents, just under half(48%) were not looking after their children (Emerson et al. 2005). However,this figure included children who had left home because they had grown up and,therefore, it must not be assumed that 48% of parents with a learning disability hadhad their children taken into care. These figures contrast greatly with the findingsfrom an in-depth follow-up study of 64 cases referred to children’s social care whereone or both parents had a learning disability (Cleaver and Nicholson 2007). Inthis study most children continued to live with their parents following a referral tochildren’s social care. Three years after the initial referral only 12 children (18.8%)had been removed from their parents’ care, including two children who had beenplaced for adoption.Parental learning disability and type of child abuseLearning disability is not correlated with deliberate abuse of children ‘... IQ by itself,is not a predictor either of the occurrence or of the non-occurrence of purposeful childabuse...’ (Tymchuck 1992, p.169). In fact, there is considerable evidence to showthat an accumulation of the stressors relevant to all parents are more predictiveof poor parenting than IQ scores. These include, for example, poverty, inadequatehousing, marital disharmony and violence, poor mental health, childhood abuse,substance misuse and a lack of social supports (Craft 1993; Booth and Booth1996; Cleaver and Nicholson 2007). In addition, parents may have the challengeof caring for a disabled child. Children born to parents with a learning disabilityare at increased risk of inherited learning disabilities and psychological and physicaldisorders (McGaw and Newman 2005).While there is no association between parental learning disability and child abuseor wilful neglect, there is evidence that children may suffer neglect from omission as aresult of a lack of parental education combined with the unavailability of supportive,acceptable resources (McGaw and Newman 2005). Research has identified thatmost concerns relate to inadequate levels of child care, and when children becamethe subject of a child protection plan it was usually under the category of neglect oremotional abuse (Tymchuck and Andron 1990; Cleaver and Nicholson 2007).