Quote of the Day

Parents have responsibility to provide the quality of child care, in the way which will meet their children’s basic needs. But in order to fulfil these obligations their needs as parents have to be met too. We cannot meet the needs of children without meeting the needs of parents to facilitate their parenting.

Parents, as people, have certain generic requirements — basic material needs for shelter and subsistence, and the psychosocial requirements for support, security, recognition, approval, guidance, advice, assistance, education and resources. The essential needs of reasonable shelter and financial provision is seen as foundation elements of life, and if unattended to, can create such an overpowering set of needs themselves, as to make it pointless, to consider others.

Over and above these, more specific parents’ needs’ arise at different times in the family cycle and with change of situation or life style. It is not enough to assume that intellectual understanding and competence at skills of parentcraft are sufficient to make for a satisfactory family environment. Emotional responses also require understanding, their proper interpretation, sensitivity and willingness to accommodate other people’s feelings within the family. Rutter (1974) states that these go beyond a sense of duty and responsibility, and include the whole gamut of human ‘joys and sorrows’.

Nevertheless, parents are adults and are quite rightly expected to take the child through his/her early life journey in a responsible manner. There is no doubt that parenting entails sacrifices of time, money, interest and energy and that parenting creates as well as interferes with life opportunities.

Adequate parenting requires a number of skills that are far from simple — part common-sense, part intuition, and part empathy. Most parents successfully carry the complex tasks involved in child-rearing, using a variety of methods in very diverse family, cultural, and social circumstances. Some, however, find bringing-up children difficult, burdensome, frustrating and unrewarding. Contemporary parents are often inexperienced in the care of children. They may be unaccustomed to infants because they were brought up in small families and were not given responsibilities for caring for their younger siblings, as older children of yesteryear had to do. They may have been brought up themselves in neglectful and uncaring homes and have had no opportunities to acquire a better parenting style and understanding of children’s developmental needs. They might be living in adverse social and economic circumstances that may affect the quality of everyday child-care. Additionally, lack of support and guidance, as well as social isolation brought about by diminished extended-family and community resources (from where, traditionally, help was provided), contribute to inadequate and ill-informed parenting. Growing numbers of single, young, and immature mothers (often living in poverty), who are socially isolated and unsupported, are unprepared for the demands of child-rearing, and therefore unable to provide basic physical and emotional nurturance of their offspring.

The accumulation of stresses and a deficiency of child-rearing skills often lead to child-abuse and neglect (Iwaniec, 1996; Rutter et al. 1976; Aber et al. 1981.) Generally speaking, parents acquire ideas about child-rearing from observation how other people care for their children, memories of their own up-bringing, television, reading and education. This includes a timetable of expectations against which a child’s action and progress are measured. Quite often, however, their expectations are neither rational nor accurate.

Parents who know little of child development are ill-equipped for the tasks ahead. They may interpret the child’s behaviour inappropriately, thinking that their baby is doing something ‘to get at them’. Parents may have unrealistic expectations of their child, and be unable to recognise age-appropriate behaviour for what it is. They may also feel that all was well until they had a child, and hence that any change for the worse, is the child’s fault, rather than recognising the changes that they need to make, in order to accommodate the new family member. All this will not promote stable personality development. Through the experience of being accepted and understood for what they are, children in turn learn to accept and understand others.

Professionals who work with families need good training in, and knowledge of, normal child development. Parents need this too. For parents who are particularly at risk, the provision of education and guidance during pregnancy and the early months of the child’s life may be helpful. In particular, the parents’ expectations of their infants are worthy of exploration, and parents need to be told, for example, how to toilet train a child and at what age this is appropriate. The provision of this kind of advice by professionals is particularly valuable where the parents are without other sources of support or information due, perhaps, to social isolation. Parents need:

to provide physical environment in terms of place to live, to be fed, to be kept clean, to be safe, to be warm, to be dressed.
to make the child feel secure and wanted.
to help the child to develop a feeling of competence in his/her own skills.
to teach and enable the child in mixing with other children and adults and to teach a way of behaving that provides the basis to experience good social relationships.
to help the child interpret the outside world in a way that he/she can understand.
to help the child to learn gradually that his/her needs and desires are not always paramount, but that others have feelings too, and to teach how to share and wait.
to help the child recognise his/her feelings of anger, jealousy, sadness and disappointment and kow that these are understood.
to provide a model of behaviour from which the child can learn what is right and wrong.
to provide boundaries, rules and routines for the child to learn to identify the limits to his/her behaviour.
to make sure that the child’s education is attended to, both at school and at home.
to guide and supervise the child’s inside and outside activities.
to protect the child from any harm and maltreatment.
to attend to any health needs, e.g. vaccination, dental care, medical appointments, administration of medication, etc.
to teach the child to respect other people’s beliefs, culture, traditions and religions.

DOROTA IWANIEC
Iwaniec, D. (1997) Meeting children's needs - adequate and inadequate parenting style. Child Care in Practice. Vol.3 No.3 pp 50-52