Dear Colleagues,
STAY AT HOME PARENTS
Someone wrote to me after the January newsletter to thank me for "standing up for stay-at-home parents." They were mistaken – I’d want to stand up for all parents. I think many parents need to go out to work not just for financial reasons but also for a sense of fulfillment or for their own well-being. My point is that those who stay at home also need support (including a break from their children at times!)   But some of you were puzzled by my comments about Labour’s neglect of parents who stayed at home to raise children. You wanted me to be more specific. Let me give you some examples.
  Last summer the government announced that parents who stayed at home to raise children could pay extra National Insurance contributions in later years in order to buy pension rights for the years they had missed. This plan has now been dropped as ‘too expensive.’   Another example: the UK tax system, unlike that of most other

countries, does not recognise the family responsibilities of tax payers, so there is now a much higher tax burden on one earner couples in the UK. These facts speak loud about the lack of respect for what such parents contribute to our society.
  My natural sympathies have always been with the Labour Party, but I suspect that families would fare better under the new policies announced last month by David Cameron. He pointed out that benefits and regulations have been skewed to help working mothers, while those who stay at home have lost out on tax breaks such as the married couple’s allowance. The Tories promise to re balance the tax system to reward families where one parent chooses to stay at home to look after a child. The Tories also want to see a major extension of parents’ rights so that the right to ask for family-friendly hours would be extended from parents of under sixes to parents of under eighteens..

WHY ARE YOU CRITICAL OF
PROFESSIONALISM?
Some of you also wanted me to clarify what I meant when I was critical of ‘professionalism’ in family services. Again let me give you an example.
  Parents of children who have suffered brain damage need a lot of support from professionals,but they also have a huge need for peer support as well. They benefit a lot from meeting other

WHAT YOU SAID ABOUT
PROFESSIONALISM!
I’m prompted to write after
reading what you said about too much professionalism. I see so many people who have had the stuffing knocked out of them by well-meaning professionals. For years my friends and I have been discussing how our natural instincts and confidence as parents are so often thwarted by professionalism. You have always taught us as facilitators to avoid implying that ‘we know best.’ That is what delighted me years ago when I heard you speak at a seminar. The journey that began for me that day has had a profound impact on my life. Please continue to remind people not to undermine the special gift of parenting – and that more child-care provision is not always the answer we need or want.
Karen Martyniuk, Bamber Bridge, Preston

REVISED 0-6 DVD/VIDEO
There has been a generally warm welcome for the revised video/DVD for our ‘Noughts to Sixes’ Parenting Programme, launched last month. Some of you were disappointed that we had retained the BBC film of the Maudsley team’s intervention to support the Welsh child and his family, but the feedback we had received suggested that it was the actors that we really needed to replace and that the BBC film was still quite viable. Our main aim was to get rid of the ‘talking heads’ that irritated some of you and to update the family situations where clothes, glasses and hairstyles had become dated. It’s not a huge change,therefore, but we did make some changes in emphasis – for example, Andrew is put into the

time-out chair but we’ve cut
back on showing him being
held there, and the script
acknowledges that ‘it is no longer recommended that you hold the child in the chair or that you use any force.’

STOP PRESS!
We’ve just discovered some of you may have a faulty copy of the new 0-6 DVD. Please play it and let us know if and where it ‘freezes.’We’ll replace it by first class post.

WHEN PARENTS CHANGE…
I have been offering parenting work shops here in Kobe and it is a pleasure to see how the children change when the parents change. Midori Nishizawa, Kobe, Japan

ONLY ONE CHILD?
The group I facilitated was very impressed with the 0-6 video and learned a lot from it. Our only criticism was that there was only one child in most of the video families whereas things can be much more difficult when there are two or more children.
Mary Frawley, Dublin 3

DIFFICULTY WITH PARENT
ASSERTIVENESS COURSE

I have now enjoyed running
four of your courses and have found them enormously helpful and empowering. My husband and I have just run the Assertiveness course for parents of teenagers, however, and found that the participants struggled more with this material than with the parenting courses. Perhaps it was inevitably more personal than parental as they became aware of their own passivity or aggression or dishonesty. I decided to keep it very simple and to practice just the four or five techniques suggested, but how do we ensure that they grow in self-appreciation and not beat themselves up too much?
Philippa Reid-Dalglish, Hartford, Cheshire.

Editor: You are rightly concerned that the course should not knock people's confidence. Our feedback suggests that the course works better with younger parents than with parents of teenagers – who already have a lot coming at them. That said, part of our role as facilitators is to actively build parents’ self confidence and to remind them that they have always been doing the very best they could in their circumstances and with the awarenesses that they had at the time. One of our facilitators, Marijke Kempson, has also developed (for this course) an additional session onraising self-esteem – you will find it at the bottom of the menu on our website.