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focus on couples vs focus on parenting?
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Just curious, I often see that caseworkers focus interventions on parenting (usually for reasons related to the issues that have been reported or are made apparent in assessment). Sometimes this intervention gets linked with what families perceive as the system's efforts to break up couples--one parent is easier to work with, the other parent gets seen as a liability, the first parent kind of gets between caseworker and parent #2 (most often I have seen this break down by gender, with the mom as the parent who talks the most with social services, but this is not absolute). Sometimes this becomes a critical case issue--one parent is expected to lose the other parent or else lose the children. Other times the caseworker may not even consider the relationship of the parents to be a concern, yet over time, key aspects of the case change profoundly (the couple splits up, for example). I suppose a lot of this has to do with the basic health of the relationship, but we know that the same crisis that brings one couple together tears another couple apart. <BR>
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Marie Killilea said in the book <EM>Karen, </EM>"The children were an important part of my life, but Jimmy <EM>was</EM> my life." Jimmy was her husband, who at that point was seriously ill. This certainly expresses a value regarding the nature of family, partner and children. <BR>
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A lot of popular parenting resources emphasize that the parents' relationship with each other (where in a two-parent household) is the foundation for parenting, and warn that focusing on the children at the expense of that relationship is bad for the kids and the parents. <BR>
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Considering the parents' relationship with each other may add a lot of complications given time limitations for reunification and so on. Systems may become involved at any point in the life or death of a relationship. Dedicating resources to allow the parents to build on their own relationship may seem like a luxury. Preserving marriage or other long-term relationship (or encouraging marriage???) may be a terrific outcome in one case and disastrous in another, and the god-playing potential seems enormous. <BR>
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However, on reflection it strikes me as curious that assessment protocols that look at parents' relationship with community, their children, the system, and/or outside supports yet don't even mention the relationship of parents to one another (whether the parents live as a couple or not). <BR>
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Comments?<BR>
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Sheri McMahon<BR></body>
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