Parental
Competence
a sociological perspective
Parental competence
is widely equated with parentcraft. From this standpoint, good-enough
parents are endowed with the skills required to meet their child's
developmental needs while inadequate parents lack these skills.
Growing Up with Parents
who have Learning Difficulties challenges this view of competence
as an attribute of the person.
Competence is rarely
if ever a solo performance. Competence may more properly be seen
as a feature of social relationships rather than an attribute
of people as individuals. It is both situated in an individual's
social network and distributed within that network. Among
other things, such networks provide practical assistance to parents,
options for the temporary or permanent redistribution of children,
and a context for sharing, validating and enforcing standards
of child-care
Parents are not
the only people involved in bringing up children. Lots of others
play a part - from brothers and sisters, grandparents, aunts,
uncles and other relatives, through to nannies, child minders,
neighbours, friends and peers, teachers and still more distant
influences. It is clear from the life stories of the now-adult
children in this study that the strength of their parents' support
system had an important bearing on their experience of growing
up.
The notion of what
might be termed 'distributed competence' underlines the fact
that parenting is mostly a shared activity and acknowledges the
interdependencies that comprise the parenting task. From this
point of view, parental competence is actually resourced by the
family's social network. It is also vulnerable to changes over
time in the relationships that make up this network. The birth
of another child, the death of a grandparent, a change of school,
the separation of parents, the onset of unemployment, a move
to a new house can all affect the capacity of the family and
social network to sustain or support parents in their parenting.
The notion of 'distributed competence' obliges us to look at
parenting-in-context rather than at mothers and fathers as individuals.
 'Parental
competence and parents with learning difficulties', Child
and Family Social Work, 1(2), 1996, 81-86
'Parenting
in context: policy, practice and the Pollocks', Child and
Family Social Work, 1(2), 1996, 93-96.
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