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

90 Children’s Needs – Parenting Capacityprotect and support their mothers by staying home from school in order to look afterthem, and in some cases with the specific aim of stopping them from taking drugs(Barnard 2007). Children of parents with learning disabilities or mental illness mayalso act as carers (Aldridge and Becker 2003; Cleaver and Nicholson 2007).The weekends – she can’t bath herself you see properly – so at weekends when thecarer doesn’t come ... I bath my mum yeah and I wash her hair as well sometimesif I remember to wash it ...(Helen, 16, talking about her mother who has psychotic depression, quotedin Aldridge and Becker 2003, pp.70–71)Protective factorsFrom a developmental perspective, deficits in early life would be expected to bemore pervasive and severe in their effects than later parenting problems. The reasonfor this is because from this perspective, developmental competencies build upover time, each are dependent and reliant upon successful negotiation of previousstages.(Jones 2009, p.289)No one age group of childhood seems either particularly protected from ordamaged by the impact of parental mental illness (see for example d’Orban 1979),alcohol or drug problems (see for example Velleman 1996; Velleman and Templeton2007) or domestic violence (see Centre de liaison sur l’intervention et la préventionpsychosociales 2007 for a review of the research). However, a re-analysis of data 10suggests parental learning disabilities may affect children aged 5 to 9 years referredto children’s social care more than other age groups (Cleaver et al. 2007). Althoughthe numbers are small, the findings reveal that 9 of the 10 children aged 5–9 yearshad severe developmental needs compared to half of those aged 10 years and overand 40% of those under the age of 5 years. Nonetheless, regardless of the age of thechild, or the difficulties parents are experiencing, there is strong evidence to suggestthat family and social support can act as a protective factor (Ghate and Hazel 2002;Vranceanu et al. 2007).Children’s ability to cope with parental adversity is related to their gender andindividual personality. With regard to gender, findings from the US suggest boysare more likely than girls to have a learning disability; 10% of boys and 6% ofgirls aged 3 to 17 had a learning disability (Child Trends 2004). There is also someevidence to suggest that children of the same sex as a mentally ill parent are atgreater risk of developing the disorder. This is particularly so with the developmentof depression in girls (Goodyer et al. 1993). There is also some evidence to suggest10The data was gathered for a study of children referred to children’s social care services who were living withparents with learning disabilities: Cleaver and Nicholson 2007.