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THE WAY I VIEW IT

09/08/2017 08:06:00 BY PRUDENCE HLATSHWAYO

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In last week’s article we viewed the four ‘famous’ parenting styles that can assist you to feel more fulfilled as a parent.

Children develop a sense of self when they see, imitate and are guided by their parents and or their caregivers from early childhood. Actually, they view themselves through their parents’ eyes. In our practice, parenting is considered largely in terms of the facilitation of child development.
McCarthy 1995 and friends concur to the notion that social workers are unable to break free from their ‘surface-static model’ that gazes primarily on their legal responsibilities to ensure the protection of the child from harm, rather than on problems that beset parenting. Social workers are quite aware of the difficulties and struggles for parents of material deprivation, poor couple relationships and social isolation, to name a few.

According to my view, parenting is a two-way process of interaction, which is influenced by the child, as well as the parent or caregiver.
It is an open secret that studies commonly focus on the concepts of abuse, risk and need. This is conceivably not surprising as research has understandably taken its ‘lead’ from the way in which familial and childcare problems are constructed in the legislation arena. Scholars describe a range of components including the parent’s behaviour and ‘parenting skills’.

Conversely, while these skills are mentioned as a spotlight for social work attentiveness, their nature, and assessment by practitioners are utterly not the subject of analysis? My take is that studies should focus around the predefined themes of affection, control and discipline, physical care, protection, stimulation and expectations, with the consequence that social work responses are crafted around those themes too!
Parenting comes mutually with rewards and challenges; taking care of young children can be demanding. With all of life’s demands parents are often being hauled in many directions. This can create bonus stress for them. It is our goal in early intervention to provide families with supportive services. One way to support families is by adding a social work intervention.

Supportive services provided by a social worker are unique to each family’s state. Those supports can include emotional support, identifying and coordinating community resources, parent education, and counselling and crisis intervention.
A social worker is a person to talk to; someone who will listen and give parents an opportunity to talk about their feelings, challenges and life experiences. There are times in all of our lives when we need someone to speak to, because situations arise and cause stress. For instance, having a child who is at risk of having developmental delay can be stressful. It can be helpful to talk about one’s feelings, vent frustrations, and bounce ideas off another person outside of the situation. Practitioners will listen to concerns and work on a plan for services and assistance.

They should be available to support the needs of the parent as well as the child and to work with the family to make sure that they have the resources to continue their daily routines.
Assessment of parenting will not simply involve appraising the development of the child to assess how well the parenting task is carried out, but also the means of determining factors of the ecological parenting model influence and the parental capacity to carry out that task. Sometimes the parenting will be worse, sometimes it will be better. As a framework for assessing children in need, the emphasis will be to facilitate this social worker’s need to have an understanding of how the different factors fit within a particular framework, rather than existing as individual attributes of ‘vulnerability’.

It is this ‘careful analysis’ of interacting factors that is considered to provide an insight as to the effects upon children and their families.
Conclusively, babies are not born with a manual and parenting takes patience and some ingenuity. Good parenting involves a great deal of dependability and routine. While it is true that there is no single definition or accurate method of good parenting, a few parenting tips could go a long way in warranting a better future for our children.