Friday 14 August 2015

The then and now of dealing with child poverty and its consequences in the United Kingdom


Calling the 1940s through to the 1960s ‘a golden age for child care’ Bob Holman in his book, Champions for Children The lives of modern child care pioneers, which recounts the lives of Eleanor Rathbone, Marjory Allen, Clare Winnicott, John Stroud, Barbara Kahan, Peter Townsend and Holman himself,  the author makes the following observations in his preface :

Yet from their varied lives, two themes appear in common. First, that central government had to accept responsibility for dealing with child poverty. It was not sufficient to leave it to employers, voluntary agencies or the charity of individuals. Second, that local government should be the provider of high quality service for deprived children. This was not to dismiss the contribution of the voluntary services, but was rather a recognition that only local authorities could ensure a coverage of such services throughout the country. These two themes…appear again and again throughout the book. They are not entirely separate, for the champions perceived that poverty was a major factor in undermining family life.
Some may baulk at the idea of separating out special charismatic champions from the field of support to children and families where so many others have achieved a great deal, but this should not distract us from what might be drawn from Holman’s observations. It seems surprising that during a time when the United Kingdom was struggling to overcome the economic difficulties it faced as a consequence of World War II, it remained able to afford so much more for its impoverished and needy families than it does now when, austerity or not, the United Kingdom is by any measure a significantly wealthier state.
This is a cause for concern not only because of the continuing cuts to the supportive services provided by local authorities and the voluntary sector for the increasing number of children and families from our communities who need our help but also because, as a part of the overall programme of cuts, these services are being farmed out with government encouragement to large private organisations to run on the cheap in order that they can make profit for themselves and their shareholders out of the poverty of others.

Source : Holman, R (2001 ) Champions for Children The lives of modern child care pioneer Bristol, Policy Press (2013)

Tuesday 4 August 2015

CBT : science or economic propaganda ?




For some years now Cognitive Behavioural Therapies have successfully held the therapy field persuading governments and health authorities with claims that unlike other therapies, for instance, humanist or psychodynamic, the efficacy of CBT  is based on scientifically observed evidence.  While CBT may be helpful for some seeking help with anxiety, the claim that it is the panacea for all, including those who are suffering from severe anxieties, fears and other emotional stresses, surely deserves closer scrutiny.  Increasingly others are questioning the truth  that  CBT   is evidence-based. However CBT has powerful political and economic allies attracted by the various claims made that it is scripted and time-limited  and provides a one size fits all therapy.
Last November (2014), Limbus, an organisation which arranges Continued Professional Development  events for counsellors and psychotherapists in the south-west England held a national conference, Challenging the Cognitive Behavioural Therapies : The Overselling of CBT’s Evidence Base,  at the Dartington Hall near Totnes in Devon which sought to challenge the evidence provided to substantiate the claims made for CBT. The organiser of the conference, Farhad Dalal  has provided us with the following links to presentations made at the Dartington Conference and to other related papers. We offer them here because the predominance of CBT is increasingly evident in the support which is offered to children and young people.
We’ve provided below some to the papers and articles Farad Dalal has brought our notice to but there are more articles, blogs, videos of conference presentations and other resources available from this page on the Limbus website.
Conference Papers
Related Papers
Henrich, M., Heine, J. & Norenzayan, S. (2008)  The Weirdest People in the World
Articles
Callard, C and Stearn, R. (2015) IAPT, Benefits, & the Unemployed 
All these documents and much more can be found at Limbus.
This news and opinion piece was first published on the home page here on of the goodenoughcaring.com website on August 4th, 2015


Monday 3 August 2015

Parents and adults in the role of experts to children


“Children unavoidably treat their parents as though they were experts on life. They, and other adults, are the people from whom the child learns what is necessary. But the extent to which children make demands on adults which the adults don’t know what to do with is not sufficiently remarked on. It is, for example, clear to everyone concerned that the adults are unable to answer, in any satisfactory way, several of the child’s questions. The so-called facts of life are hardly a convincing answer – for anybody – to the question of why people have sex, or where babies are from. Whether children are amusing, or irritating, or ‘little philosophers’, once they learn to talk they create, and suffer, a certain unease about what they can do with words. Paradoxically, it is the adults’ own currency – words – that reveals to them the limits of adult authority. The adults are not fully competent with their own tools, but there is nobody else for the child to appeal to. Children go on asking but eventually they have to settle for the adult’s exhausted impatience and the fictions of life. ‘In the unconscious,’ Freud wrote in The Interpretation of Dreams, ‘nothing can be brought to an end, nothing is past or forgotten.’ Curiosity is endless, as every parent knows, in a way that answers are not.”

Adam Phillips (1994)

 Source : an extract from ‘The Experts’ by the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips in The London Review of Books Vol. 16 No. 24 · 22 December 1994.
 This entry was posted on July 31st, 2015 on the home page of  goodenoughcaring.com