Britain's troubled families

Quote

“In each family a story is playing itself out, and each family's story embodies its hope and despair.”  Auguste Napier

News

In the wake of the riots that erupted in Britain last August, the government tasked Louise Casey with investigating the 120,000 ‘troubled families’ that cost the UK taxpayer £9 billion annually.  Her initial report this week described how many of these families are trapped in an intergenerational cycle of welfare dependency, violence and abuse. 

Ms Casey wrote “…the traditional approach of services reaching individual family members… and trying to fix single issues such as 'drug use', 'non-attendance at school' or 'domestic violence' in these families is most often destined to fail. Their behaviours and problems can be properly understood only by looking at the full cycle – and the full family.”

It is a positive step to take this integrated view of families – not an easy task given that government services are organised around specialised agencies, each with a different mandate.   For this approach to be effective, a relational perspective is needed also, to get to the underlying causes. 

Dysfunctional families are those in which core relationships are broken, absent or toxic.  A family is a system, with an internal relational structure through which values (whether good or bad) are transferred.  If values are not passed on by design, then they will be passed on by default.

Therefore one of the most effective interventions for turning troubled families around over time is by building and strengthening two core relationships, to make them more viable and sustainable: the relationship between the child’s mother and father, and the parenting relationship. 

Supporting couple relationships education and parenting initiatives will not solve all the immediate problems of the most troubled families, but it could go a long way towards breaking the cycle and introducing a glimmer of hope that the next generation will not be condemned to repeat the same, tragic cycle.

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Another crucial relationship involved in supporting dysfunctional families is the one between local government agencies and the family members.  A project in Swindon set out to build strong relationships and increase the time key workers spend face to face with families, rather than on paperwork, from 20% to 80%.  Read about this innovative and influential pilot project here. 

Walk the talk

How aware are you of the most troubled families in your neighbourhood? Why not contact the local council and find out what initiatives are being taken to bring about lasting changes, and see if there is any way you could support them?

The last word

From the Bible, Isaiah chapter 1, verse 17:  “…learn to do right!  Seek justice, encourage the oppressed.  Defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow.”