What
is Supported Parenting?
'Supported parenting
is a philosophy, not a curriculum.' (Polly
Snodgrass)
Supported parenting
is a principled approach to helping families headed by a parent
or parents with learning difficulties.
It is about developing
new forms of support that are responsive to parents' perceptions
of their own needs.
The supported parenting
model involves working long term to build on a family's strengths
in order to promote competence and sustain independence.
The idea of supported
parenting is grounded on a core of practice principles that have
emerged from the experience of working with mothers and fathers
who have learning difficulties and their children. Foremost among
these core principles are the following:
- Support must be
based on respect for the parents and for the emotional bond between
the parents and their children.
- Parents should
be regarded as a resource, not as a problem.
- Parents have needs
as people too.
- Support should
be directed to the family as a unit rather than to individual
members.
- Parents should
be enabled to feel in control and to experience being competent.
- Intervention should
focus on building a family's strengths rather than on attending
to its weaknesses.
- Families are best
supported in the context of their own extended families, neighbourhoods
and communities.
- Parents must be
engaged as active partners in service planning and involved as
equals in choices and decisions affecting their family.
 Tim
Booth and Wendy Booth, 'Supported
parenting for people with learning difficulties: lessons from
Wisconsin', Representing Children, 9(2), 1996, 99-107.
|
