Families at risk / edited by Nicola Madge.

Date:
1983
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Families at risk / edited by Nicola Madge. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    1 An Introduction to Families At Risk Nicola Madge This book tells the story of unhappy families, about parents who are badly off, burdened with problems, emotionally distraught, or lacking physical or moral support, and about their children whose welfare, well-being and development may suffer as a result. It is in part a sad tale as it relates how family misfortunes can be passed on from parents to their children and shows that troubles can be persistent and per¬ vasive. But it does have some happy endings. Not all children from difficult backgrounds turn out to be scarred for life, and indeed some achieve considerable success. There are three main purposes of this tale and these are to describe the lives of families who are less well-off and less successful than families in general; to find out why the life chances of families are so different; and to develop some means of predicting the families most likely to be in difficulty. The context is contemporary Britain and, in the main, the evidence used to examine these issues is drawn from research carried out for the DHSS/SSRC investigation into Trans¬ mitted Deprivation. This work was commissioned to test the 'cycle of deprivation' thesis, which suggests that personal and social problems tend to run in families and become concentrated within a small section of the community, and took shape in a range of studies that almost always focused on families where there was a good chance that both parents and their children would show some form of disadvantage. Later chapters describe individual empirical studies carried out for this programme of research. Before introducing these in more detail, however, it is helpful to clarify two concepts encountered throughout this volume. First, what are 'families' today? And, second, what do we mean by the term 'at risk'? What are 'familes'? 'Families', as referred to throughout this book, are children and their caretaker(s) - and by no means all conform to the popular image of youngsters and their two natural parents. As the Study Commission on the Family (1980) and others have noted, changes in social attitudes, followed by changes in the law, have resulted - even over the past decade or so - in earlier marriage, more marriage, more divorce and more remarriage, and an increasing number of children living in single-