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Hard to reach?
Health and wellbeing
'Did your mum and dad mess you up?' as Phillip Larkin suggested, though he was more emphatic in his use of language. We certainly think that other peoples' mums and dads
mess them up. Just look at the recent press coverage of the English riots and some of the UK government's pronouncements about the causes. As usual, parents have a lot to answer for.
A current, bandied-about phrase is "hard-to-reach". This is code for intractable, unco-operative - possibly neglectful and inadequate. It can cover every parent who doesn't come to parents' evenings, who is never at the school gates (or if they are, they are swearing at their children), who sends their children to school unkempt and without breakfast - and much more besides.
It can become a cover-all for the types of parents we would never be. And it can come as quite a surprise that some of the worst-off children in our care actually love their feckless parents and share more of their values than ours.
In a native American tradition, it is said that the people we are today have been made by ancestors stretching back seven generations. And conversely, we have influence some seven generations ahead. That's about 200 years back and forth - not an unimaginable timescale.
In some of the schools The Place2Be works in, we can trace back four generations of parental unemployment, alcohol misuse, poverty and low aspiration. The three generations preceding likely won't be much cop either. Offering counselling to so-called hard-to-reach parents - an intervention The Place2Be makes - is one attempt to interrupt a cycle and offers a time to reflect on and learn from such difficult contexts.
But government pronouncements laying cause and effect on the shoulders of such parents can be hard to stomach. There is a social and historical context here which would make any of us "hard-to-reach". It will never be easy drawing in people who have not gained from the institutions society promotes - that includes schools; institutions where many of these parents may have had some of their early experiences of failure. But judgements on those who have had lives many of us would not survive is certainly no way to build bridges.
Jonathan Wood, National Manager for The Place2Be in Scotland, has more than 30 years' experience in the voluntary sector, working in the fields of mental health, education, children and families, homelessness, drug addiction and learning disability.
Drawing on his own experience of leading The Place2Be's service in Scotland for the last four years, Jonathan will be writing a series of articles over the next five issues of Teaching Scotland focusing on emotional health and wellbeing. These articles will lead on to podcasts with a range of contributors - teachers, headteachers and Directors of Children's Services - all giving their views and insights to supporting children's emotional health and wellbeing in schools in 2011.
Award-winning charity
The Place2Be works in 172 schools to improve the emotional wellbeing of children, their families and the whole school community, providing school-based counselling and support, as well as professional qualifications for counsellors and trainee counsellors. For more information visit www.theplace2be.org.uk
Podcast
Jonathan Wood, National Manager of the Place2Be, talks to Irene Myrtle, Headteacher Longstone Primary School about teachers' mental health and wellbeing. Listen to the podcast by clicking on the play icon of the player below:
If you have any problem using the above player, please click on the link below to listen to the podcast:
Place2Be Podcast: Oct 2011