Part 1: Challenges Facing Parents Today

Part 2: The Importance of Informal Support

Part 3: What You
Can Do

References

No one can raise a child alone, without the support of family, friends, neighbors, and the kindness of strangers. Fathers and mothers who are struggling with their children cannot depend on each other for satisfying support. The pressures of child rearing affect everyone in a family. Under these conditions, parents need a kind word and a helping hand from someone outside the family who understands and cares.

This critical resource of informal support has to be freely given. Few, if any, parents will go out and ask for it. No government or charitable agency can hand it to someone. It cannot be purchased. Parents and nonparents alike have to offer it freely. We have to care about what happens to parents in our community; we have to go beyond the idea and feeling of caring to taking action.

While formal support involves sponsored professional services, informal support involves a network of family, friends, and neighbors who provide resources to parents to help them deal with the pressures of child rearing. These resources include emotional reassurance, information, social participation, material aid and physical assistance. Social support is imbedded in a network, a set of interconnected relationships among a group of people that provides enduring patterns of nurturance that enables people to cope with their children on a day-to-day basis (see Garbarino, 1983, p. 5).

Why should we care about parents? First, the act of caring is ennobling. Experiencing compassion and responding with support to someone facing adversity makes us more human, more humane. This does not make us superior in any way. On the contrary, support given by someone who meets us eye-level and treats us like a fellow traveler is much more satisfying. The act of caring is an expression of great personal power that lifts both the giver and receiver.

Second, a community that cares about parents becomes a more attractive place for families to live. This has significant implications for community well-being and economic growth.

Third, each of us is affected when parents become ineffective in raising a child. Our taxes have to support services to keep that child and then adult an active member of society. Drug abuse, teenage pregnancy and other problems cited above carry tremendous public costs. The criminal who breaks into our home or assaults our loved ones on the street may be the product of parents who lost control and authority when that person was still in the home. The costs of imprisoning someone are also enormous. Providing support for parents will not necessarily prevent all of these problems. But isolated parents and their children are at-risk.

Of course we need effective governmental programs to provide more formal support to parents. But the informal network is the most critical of all resources. When that fails-when a person no longer feels connected with other human beings who will listen to the story of their struggle, gently pat their back with encouragement, and help them think through their problems-more formal resources are less effective. The informal network must be strengthened.

The power of the social support network of family, friends, and neighbors for someone experiencing distress is clearly documented. In their review of the research on social support and parents, Smith and Kuhn (1996) made the following conclusions:

Social isolation is a significant risk factor for child abuse. The maladaptive behavior of abusing parents is, in part, the result of the absence of stress- and anxiety-reducing mechanisms provided by strong, supportive social networks. Less support creates more anxiety and leads to fewer adaptive responses to stressful situations. Neglectful mothers tend to be lonely and isolated. Social networks provide parents with emotional support and assistance that improved their disposition and reduced the tendency to use coercive discipline.

Social support for parents may be critical for families living in poverty. Neglectful mothers living in poverty were found to be significantly more isolated from family members and neighbors than those not living in poverty. Poor parents are unable to purchase services, e.g., child care, that reduce stress on child rearing. Perceiving a lack of social support may intensify feelings of hopelessness that in turn may influence the way poor parents interact with their children. Poor parents who reported few sources of assistance to draw upon in a crisis were especially likely to report that they yelled at or slapped their children very often. Economic deprivation combined with a lack of social support creates a dangerous situation for children.

Parents experiencing stress may not feel empowered to reach out to others. Adversity tends to undermine a person's confidence in reaching out to others, especially if the problem is thought to elicit little sympathy. Feelings of inadequacy can be projected outward, and affected individuals may believe that others have little interest in helping them. They may misinterpret the efforts of others to help. Neglecting and maltreating mothers, although in much greater need of support than most other parents, were likely to avoid potential sources of help or act in ways that discouraged others from offering help. Those most in need of support often have to depend on others to take the initiative.

Individuals in the community are often less responsive to offer help to parents experiencing chronic stress, especially when the conditions are stigmatizing. Parents who are too emotionally fragmented to be effective with their children may be shunned as undeserving by the community. For example, parents whose child care falls markedly below accepted norms, as evidenced by neglect, are likely to be distanced by their neighbors and others in the community. Parents who need the support the most may not appear very attractive to potential helpers. These parents may burn out the sources of support in the informal network by the intensity of their need and their inability to to reciprocate support.

The failure of a community to respond effectively is not limited to families who deviate from acceptable norms for parenting behavior. The longer a child is ill, for example, the less support parents may receive from the informal network of family and friends. This support may be considerable during the early stages of a child's illness, but potential helpers may eventually become distracted by other demands. They may feel powerless to make a difference or may not know what to do. Parents of handicapped children often experience social isolation. The social networks of parents of handicapped children are smaller than those of parents without handicapped children.

Social support increases parental self-confidence and moderates or buffers stress. Women who reported high levels of social support during prenatal assessment subsequently reported higher levels of self-confidence in the parenting role and less depression three months after delivery. Women who had other people on whom they could rely for a variety of social resources had more confidence in their ability to perform well as mothers. This confidence was then an effective deterrent to depression. Both friendship and community support consistently acted to moderate mother's experiences of daily hassles on their relationships with others. Fathers often lack emotional support and frequently feel lonely.

The social support of parents has an indirect positive effect on children. Women with higher quality support had healthier babies and experienced less postpartum depression. Mothers' satisfaction with their personal networks and the size of their maternal networks was related to a warmer and less intrusive style of interaction with their children. The availability of social support for parents is particularly critical when the family is under stress. Irritable infants, growing up in families characterized by low support for their mothers, experienced less responsive mothering. Under these conditions, infants developed insecure attachments.

The support of friends is significant and may be less stressful than support from relatives. Family members are more likely to offer instrumental help and some emotional support while friends are the main sources of emotional and cognitive support, such as the need for approval, engaging others in discussion and opinion sharing, and seeking advice and information. Fathers were found to be more likely to rely on friends than relatives for emotional support.

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