1 / 9

Response to Deborah Ghate: Supporting parents in the poorest communities Ilan Katz (SPRC)

Response to Deborah Ghate: Supporting parents in the poorest communities Ilan Katz (SPRC) ACWA Conference Sydney, August 2010. Will cover. What I see as the main points of Deborah’s talk Reflections on some of the issues Relevance to Australia. Some key points. Importance of parenting

kineks
Download Presentation

Response to Deborah Ghate: Supporting parents in the poorest communities Ilan Katz (SPRC)

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Response to Deborah Ghate: Supporting parents in the poorest communities Ilan Katz (SPRC) ACWA Conference Sydney, August 2010

  2. Will cover • What I see as the main points of Deborah’s talk • Reflections on some of the issues • Relevance to Australia

  3. Some key points • Importance of parenting • Challenges faced by parents in poor environments • Difficulty accessing formal and informal support • Children can be supportive and/or burdensome • Many parents cope despite adversity • Impact of local neighbourhood • Some forms of parenting support work well but others don’t • The importance of evidence based interventions.

  4. Issues - parenting • Is the focus on parenting justified? • Should we not focus on poverty rather than parenting? • What are the implications for state surveillance of parents? • Should parenting programs focus on child behaviour or on wider factors eg employment • Supports other than parenting programs • Cash transfers, child care etc. • Should there be an explicit ‘contract’ between the state and parents?

  5. Issues – evidence based parenting practice • Is there really evidence that the more ‘evidence based’ an intervention is, the more effective it will be? • Intention to treat • Do we change the things that are easy rather than those that are important? eg warmth • Do we know how to change poor communities? • Sure Start and CfC • Implementation science • Importance of other factors such as commitment, leadership etc of large scale interventions • Other challenges of taking to scale

  6. Evidence and parenting • How much evidence of cross-cultural effectiveness? • What is the evidence of population level changes and long term effects? • Cumulative effect of multiple evidence based programs • The question of hype – understanding what we can and cannot easily change.

  7. Relevance for Australia • Parenting support in Australia still embryonic and fragmented • eg only now implementing PPL • No parenting academy, institute etc. • Many pilot and one off initiatives – CfC, HIPPY, BF etc • Services and benefits more targeted than in the UK • Australia provides extreme example of state surveillance of parenting • NTER • Cape York Initiative • New Income Management • Lack of real investment in rigorous evaluation

  8. Other Australian issues • How much of the evidence base has to be Australian? • Do these conclusions apply for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families and the particular migrant groups in Australia? • Australia lucky that there is some policy commitment to early intervention and family support.

  9. Ilan Katz Social Policy Research Centre Ilan.katz@unsw.edu.au www.sprc.unsw.edu.au G2 Western Campus University of New South Wales Kensington 2052 NSW, Australia +61 2 9385 7810

More Related