The chief executive of Parentline Plus, the charity that will help run the new National Parenting Academy, tells Yvonne Roberts how support and advice to families in crisis is needed more than ever.

Adult approach

Dorit Braun has seen some welcome changes over the last decade in public attitudes towards parenting courses. The chief executive of Parentline Plus says: "Ten years ago, if a cab driver asked what I did, the response was: 'That's for bad parents, isn't it?' Now they invariably say: 'What's the number?'"
The government will today announce that a new National Parenting Academy is to be run by a consortium consisting of Parentline Plus, the National Parenting Institute and King's College London. But while shoring up parents is becoming a flourishing industry, parenting courses are still regarded by many as a hobby for affluent adults, or are associated with compulsion and stigma. Many of the services that do exist are fragmented, uncoordinated and delivered by the untrained.

Parentline Plus, a national charity that offers parent-to-parent support, is one of the exceptions. Created in 1996 out of three charities - Parentline UK, the National Stepfamily Association and Parent Network - Parentline Plus now employs 320 people, has 260 volunteers, and has a turnover of £6m a year. It runs a 24-hour helpline taking emails and telephone calls from more than 115,000 people a year, 20% of whom are fathers. Its website offers chatrooms so parents can advise other parents on issues such as behaviour, bullying - and whether the 15-year-old girlfriend should stay the night.

As well as sustained telephone support, parents across the country are helped in one-to-one sessions, in groups and via leaflets. An independent evaluation of the helpline by the Thomas Coram Research Unit, published tomorrow, reveals a sparkling endorsement. Approval ratings on helpfulness, advice and emotional support are in excess of 85%. One parent in the study said: "I wanted to say 'I need help' to someone without being worried, or fear of being judged. I was in a catatonic state. I really wanted advice."

Braun admits: "We do have the 'worried well' with minor worries. And that, in itself, is a reflection of the demise of the extended family. But we also believe that the number of parents with deeply entrenched problems, already at crisis level, is much more widespread than anyone is comfortable admitting.

Scale of support
"What's really scary is that we are the major providers of support in the country, and what we are offering is peanuts. We have 24 million adults who are parents or carers in the UK. Even if only 10% of that number would like support at any one time, you can see the scale of the expansion that's required."

Traditionally, politicians have kept a wary distance from private family life. In 1998, when Jack Straw, the then Home Secretary, published Supporting Families, the first-ever consultation paper on family policy, he stressed that "families do not want to be lectured or hectored".

Most of the ensuing policies - increased childcare, improved parental rights - stayed away from the daily, intimate, interactions between parent and child. That has changed. Driven by concern about antisocial behaviour, and the UK's poor placement on international league tables on child wellbeing, the agenda is shifting towards prevention and raising parental aspirations. So, rightly or wrongly, government is directly taking on how even non-abusive parents behave towards their offspring.

This change was first seen in the Every Child Matters strategy. Alan Johnson, the education secretary, says the recently published document, Every Parent Matters, is the beginning of a national debate on "how best to support and engage parents".

It pulls together initiatives that include: a commissioner in each local authority to "champion" parent support; recruitment of an army of "parenting practitioners"; and the demand that all frontline social care professionals - teachers, youth workers, health visitors (in desperately short supply) - have specialised training. A national academy for parenting practitioners will establish a unified approach, while a parent "know how" service will be available from 2010-2011.

Braun is the divorced mother of three sons, and "besotted" grandmother. As a parent, she says, "like every one else, I have good days and bad days". Twenty years in the family lobby hasn't diluted her passion, nor dented her sense of humour. Her responses often come with dry asides and peals of laughter. "Dorit makes people do what they never imagined they were capable of doing," says one colleague. "That's very useful in the voluntary sector."

During his budget speech, Gordon Brown mentioned only two charities, Childline and Parentline Plus, promising extra funds and expansion. Braun, who had no idea it would be thrust into the fiscal limelight, says: "We were over the moon. Our funding for next year was extremely fragile. At a local level, our face-to-face services are still very unstable."

One in seven children lives in a family without work; one in eight lives in a stepfamily; one in four lives with a single parent. Add to that cultural and ethnic differences, and the impact of different adult priorities - for instance, what matters more to a child, income or parental time? - then what exactly constitutes "good enough" parenting and how it should be taught, and by whom, becomes ever more complex. How, for instance, do you resist imposing middle-class standards on working-class family life?

"That's what we most definitely don't do," Braun says. "We see ourselves as working alongside parents whose desire is to do the best for their children. Many of our practitioners have come through support schemes themselves.

"Good enough parenting is often about confidence, empathy and good communication. It's about listening to children more and reacting less. It's a lot about boundary setting and how those settings change as the child grows older. "The pendulum has swung hugely," she adds. "Now it's as if parenting support is supposed to fix everything. It won't. It can't get rid of poor housing and low income, but it can point to entitlements that aren't claimed and agencies that may be able to help. The narrative around parenting today is mainly about blame. So when parents struggle, they assume it is their own fault. If we can establish that asking for help is a responsible thing to do, then that's a huge step."

Future delivery
One of the obvious worries, once the state becomes part of the family, is the tension between care and control. Braun would prefer, for instance, that parenting orders, compelling adults to attend courses, were first offered on a voluntary basis. This is all the more important because a series of studies pulled together in 2004 by David Quinton, professor of psychological development at Bristol University's centre for family policy and child welfare, concluded that while the effectiveness of parenting support was "untested", what did appear to work was holistic, not piecemeal, help provided in partnership with parents.

Braun says she is also concerned about future delivery. "A huge problem for government is that generally they want people to 'turn up'. For instance, to get Jobseeker's Allowance you turn up at the jobcentre and go through a process that, bureaucratically and administratively, opens up other avenues. Now government is seeking to create an equivalent in parenting support, but there isn't one although the government is intending for children's centres and schools to become key arenas there will always be parents who won't go. We trudge streets and estates leafleting, knocking on doors. We go wherever people have to go as part of their daily life. We work with people no one else is reaching."

Every Parent Matters promises a parent's charter, offered locally, laying out parental responsibilities - for instance in encouraging a child at school - and detailing a parent's rights in terms of the services to which they are entitled.

"A charter is welcome because parents are much more likely to 'opt in' for support once they know what's available," Braun says. "Our work is based on the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child. Yet those values still aren't a given in society at large. Similarly, while parents obviously have responsibilities, 'rights' can all too easily end up as a struggle between mothers and fathers, especially after separation, instead of negotiating to meet the needs of the children."

The ethos of Parentline Plus is universality - "all parents have difficulties from time to time" - reflected in its recently changed logo. Previously, it showed a parent and child in a box. Now the box has been removed, as if to underline that good enough parenting is everybody's business, not part of a closed-off world. Its new campaign also tries to express the positive side of parenting, the joy - a word not much used in political discussions on family life.

"In parenting, there are lows like nothing else, but there are also the most amazing highs," Braun says. "Sometimes, that pleasure gets forgotten."

Yvonne Robert, interview with Dorit Braun
25 April 2007

http://society.guardian.co.uk/children/story/0,,2064488,00.html

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