Comas was commissioned by the East Edinburgh Neighbourhood Partnership in 2010 to conduct a study on the needs of parents in east Edinburgh, gathering the views of professionals, parents and carers, identifying potential gaps in current provision and highlighting issues concerning the accessibility of services to parents.
We tried to build a picture of family life in East Edinburgh in which we recognised that, day to day, parents and carers create a quality of life for their family, which is reflected in, and affected by, their connection with their immediate community, as well as other material aspects of their lives such as income, housing and status (e.g. legal status as a UK citizen).

The whole parent

We reported on a picture of ‘the whole parent’ very simply like this:


The adult
Parenting is stronger when adults in families are confident, healthy and act as positive role models. It is therefore important to consider whether adults who become parents or carers can still access opportunities to become confident, healthy and active adults who model positive social behaviour, ambition and self efficacy. It is also important to consider whether services which help adults (e.g. health and mental health services, adult education, advice services, offender services) are able to provide their services in a parent-friendly way. Childcare is clearly a key aspect of developing parent-friendly adult opportunities. To some extent, the availability of leisure activities for children and young people have the potential to enable parents to access adult opportunities, but only if there is effort to co-ordinate the scheduling of opportunities for both adults and children.

The parent
Parenting reflects the transitions that children grow through, from rapid development and dependence in the early years to a different set of challenges as children mature and become more independent in their teens – in other words, parenting requires constant adaptation, energy and resourcefulness. Parents may need a range of external resources to cope with the challenges of parenting, including information and advice; role models from their own parents, wider family or friends; or opportunities to actively learn different approaches to parenting and how to cope with specific issues.
Family learning taking in place in schools appears to support both adult opportunities (e.g. preparation for employment), and parenting opportunities, engaging parents in their children’s learning.

The family
The quality of the relationship between the parent and the child can be enhanced by the quality of the time they spend together. Some parents can afford holidays, outings and activities together; others may be more reliant on freely accessible opportunities which welcome parents and children together. We suggest that the more confident and affluent the parent, the more likely it is that ‘family’ activities together can be sustained into their children’s teenage years, as the parent can afford attractive activities and is not necessarily confined to their local area provision. ‘Family activities’ are different than activities for children and young people only. It is more challenging for public services to provide activities for the whole family and it requires different skills than youth work or children’s work, or adult education work.

Parents and resilience
A further aspect of helping parents to be resilient is helping to avoid ‘pile-ups’ of issues and concerns. Research shows that people are less likely to recover quickly if the fragile balance in their lives between ‘just managing’ and ‘not coping’ is upset by one difficulty, which then causes other issues to feel unmanageable.  This suggests that when opportunities to help parents arise within any service, it is worth looking at the parent’s whole life, not just one issue that appears the most pressing at that time, in order to prevent a pile-up of difficulties.

The connected parent
We found that several factors needed to be accounted for when considering how parents find and receive information on services and opportunities available to them.

• People who need intensive support generally have some contact with services – they are ‘hard to reach’ because of characteristics such as chaotic lifestyle. The key challenge with providing information is relevance and timeliness to the parents’ immediate concerns, and ways of retrieving information easily
• People who need support but have not reached crisis point may have very limited contact with services, and part of their need for support may be social isolation – they are hard to reach because they are unknown to services. The key challenge with providing information is making best use of universal services
• Accessibility of information was a key issue in the Craigmillar area, where adult literacy is lower and where the written word is not the favoured form of communication for some groups, such as gypsy travellers. Other groups have English as a second language.

Community mapping conducted from the point of view of parents’ lives may help identify how networks of information and communication could be used and further developed. Using the ‘whole parent’ model, we sketched out a range of issues parents may experience, and the range of groups and services in the community which may touch their lives or which could provide the safety net to strengthen parents lives. However, how parents perceive and use the community network depends very much on factors intrinsic to their own personal network.




This community mapping is only indicative of what services or opportunities adults may require during their parenting years. Some forms of support need not be local if it is specialised and local demand indicates city-wide delivery, although accessibility (e.g. location, timing, cost of transport, or availability on an outreach basis) needs to be assessed for non-local services. Parents who are confident, have access to transport/finance for public transport, and childcare support, are more likely to access support and opportunities outwith their local area and see their ‘community’ as city-wide rather than very local. However, parents in Craigmillar who require some specialised support may be less likely to access services delivered on a city-wide bases for these reasons.  The red, amber and green coding indicates service provision in relation to local need. Red=demand is greater than provision; Amber=current provision is stretched; Green=demand is satisfied by current provision.

We observed during the study, and professionals’ comments confirmed, that parents in the greater Craigmillar area are initially suspicious of professional help. Niddrie Mill and St Frances Primary Schools have overcome this by developing parent councils and enabling parent council members to act as information resources to other parents. Many professionals and parents felt word of mouth was the most effective way to spread information about services. Parent to parent endorsement of what services can offer and what opportunities are available appears to work well in the primary schools. This suggests there is potential to engage community members as identified information champions for other parents to approach in a range of community settings.

Findings

1. Parents need support and opportunities as adults, parents and together with children as a family. Services from all sectors working with either adults or children and families can make a difference to the quality of life for families by working together and making information available to parents. Positive examples of local networking between early years professionals could be replicated without sectoral boundaries, to bring a greater commitment to providing holistic support (recognising parents as adults within child and family services, and recognising adults as parents within adult services).
2. Forming helping relationships with harder to reach parents is skilled work requiring persistence, time and continuity, together with an understanding of issues such as attachment difficulties in adults. Multi-agency training, perhaps linked to GIRFEC (which promotes active engagement of parents in planning for children), could ensure the expertise of some services (e.g. child and family centres) is shared with other agencies to help adults learn and develop their resilience through stronger social connections.
3. Since relationships with parents take time to establish, high staff turnover or high vacancy rates reduce the effectiveness of services. Short term initiatives may be appealing opportunities to undertake pilots or rapid pieces of work to compensate for the challenges in finding secure, long term resources in the current climate. But new initiatives may be more effective in building relationships and achieving short term outcomes if they are attached to existing services and personnel already known to parents in the area. However, we are also aware of the risk of professionals in demanding roles becoming jaded if there is constant pressure to do ‘new’ work when existing approaches are under-resourced and feel under-valued.
4. Community and voluntary groups feel under particular pressure in the current financial climate. This has the potential to reduce community capacity and the development of local support networks. Many funders regard the Greater Craigmillar area as an undifferentiated whole; however, the local community operates as a series of neighbourhoods with distinct boundaries in spite of the regeneration which as redrawn the community over the last decade.
5. There are communities of interest within the geographic community. Craigmillar is a changing community with an increasingly diverse population. Since some migrant families are particularly vulnerable to financial exclusion and social isolation, some consideration of how to engage the ethnic minority communities locally may be a useful preventive approach. Approaches to engaging the gypsy traveller community in Craigmillar have been successful in the past and this seems to be a distinct community, which at present has no dedicated liaison or support.
6. Parenting support in the area is focusing on parents with additional or intensive needs. There is a need for a wider range of options for earlier intervention and parent self-referral to services, particularly for parents of teenagers, for fathers, and for kinship carers.
7. Parents want a wider range of opportunities for family activities which are fun and affordable.
8. Low literacy levels in the Craigmillar area indicate a proactive approach to communication and information is required, finding ways to build on the word of mouth networks and local knowledge of parents who are activists.