The Times, June 8, 1983

Jennie is in her early forties and is one of a growing number of people attracted to workshops run by a new national organization called Exploring Parenthood. A primary school teacher, she divorced her alcoholic husband 15 months ago and is bringing up three children aged 10, seven and five. She says: “I think that the old guidelines for bringing up a family have gone out of the window - religion is weak and moral values have been turned upside down.

“I don't turn to friends for advice because none is in a similar position; and my parents, like many others, are suspicious of anything starting with ‘psy', so they fall back on the traditional ways of bringing up a family.”

She does not know what caused her husband's alcoholism, but says that with his strict religious background, he thought he could cure it through his own willpower and was not prepared to seek psychotherapeutic help. But Jennie took herself to a psychiatrist and the family to a child guidance clinic to help them through this difficult time. “There were no specific problems - the children weren't bed-wetting or screaming at night - but I wanted a safety net for them and a sounding-board for myself to test out what I was thinking and feeling. I am aware of some of the traps, like becoming a dominant mother to my son when there is no father figure. I wondered if I was wasting the child counsellor's time, but she said it was refreshing for her to see a family before the children had become delinquent and before the mother was having a nervous breakdown; a great deal of children's behaviour depends on how the mother is feeling and coping.”

Exploring Parenthood discusses and explores with professionals as well as with other parents the everyday challenges and pleasures of being a parent. It was formed in 1982 by Ruth Schmidt, a child psychotherapist, and Carolyn Douglas, a family therapist, who were colleagues for seven years in the Department for Children and Parents at the Paddington Centre for Psychotherapy. Through their work at the centre they saw a wide social range of children with behavioural problems and realized that there is a great lack of knowledge about the emotional development of children and adults, and that many parents would have welcomed the opportunity to discuss behaviour patterns with professionals before a crisis erupted.

In 1981 Ruth and Carolyn were invited to give a workshop on parenthood for the Westminster Pastoral Foundation (an organization for training counsellors). Afterwards they sent a report to Dr Hugh Jolly, peadiatrician at Charing Cross Hospital. Jolly became interested and spent an afternoon questioning them on their ideas and aims. At the end he suggsted they should start a national organization as he felt there was a great need for such workshops. He is now joint sponsor of Exploring Parenthood with Richard Whitfield, Professor of Education at Aston University.

Carolyn is in her early forties and is married with three children; Ruth is in her late thirties and is unmarried. Both are warm and caring. They have selected a team of 12 professionals from people whose work they know well and most of whom have families. This peripatetic team, which includes psychiatrists, psychologists, analysts, therapists and a marriage guidance counsellor, will travel to any part of Britain to give a workshop. They have already held two in London and one in Paris for English-speaking parents abroad (Carolyn is now based in Paris because of her husband's job). Workshops usually take the form of talks from professionals followed by small group discussions. Requests to run workshops have come from groups as varied as the North East Pre-School Playgroups Association, parents representing the National Childbirth Trust and National Housewives Register and a London-based company for their employees, mostly male, who often face stress of various linds with their families. The themes of future workshops will include Divorce and separation; Parents and their adolescent children, and Full Circle, from birth to old age, including parenting one's parents.

Is such an organization really necessary? I asked a north London GP who for 14 years has run a large family practice. He felt that parents would, be unlikely to go to such workshops unless they had a problem, and that the National Health Service in most parts of the country provides an adequate standard of help for people with specific problems. But, he added, many people are frightened about seeking professional advice, particularly if the problem is emotional rather then physical, and an organization which bridged the gap between parents and professionals would be a good thing.

The doctor also pointed out that most social rules have been succesfully challenged over the last 20 years and this had led to insecurity and uncertainty about where the boundaries lie. More children were going to his surgery with physical complaints - headaches, tummy aches and recently a severe case of eczema - which turned out to be caused by emotional stress at home.

Who goes to the Exploring Parenthood workshops? A surprising variety of people - happily married couples, single fathers/mothers, divorced, separated people and one couple who did not have children but wanted to know how a family might affect their lives. One single-parent father, who runs his own business from home, does the cooking and housework and brings up his teenage son and daughter, says he finds the workshops useful because they provide “a professional environment where I can discuss intimate worries with intelligent people - not subjects I particularly want to discuss with my friends. Having to be mother and father, I want to increase my knowledge of how children develop emotionally and physically, so that I can help them to realize their potential.”

Most, but not all, participants are middle class. One woman who is not, a representative of the One O'Clock Club run by the GLC, says, “Many London working class parents of pre-school children feel isolated, either because they are single parents or because they have moved away from their families. They feel they are constantly being criticized and told what to do, when in fact they are doing a good parenting job, but need their self-confidence built up in order to carry on.”

Her observation was supported by the results of a survey just published in Woman magazine. Of 7,000 mothers who replied to a questionnaire, one in seven hardly ever ventures out with small children because of the hostility they meet from the general public; the combination of this hostility and the physical problems with push-chairs on public transport revealed that one in three never take their children on trains and one in five don't attempt to travel on a bus; one in three won't go to the local park because of the dogs' dirt or fear of gangs of youths. Considering that 70 per cent of women in Britain don't drive, these are appalling figures.

Don't most people turn to their friends and family for advice on bringing up children? Ruth replied; “The notion that problems can safely be contained within the family is highly idealized. Much misery and thwarting of growth went unnoticed in the past, mainly because people's expectations were more limited and the idea of personal growth and change had not become as accept- able as it is today. An understanding of emotional development is hardly a luxury pursuit for the limited few, but an extension of public health.”

Ruth and Carolyn believe there is a tremendous emotional investment in parenthood - often blanketed by secrecy because of the fear of failure. The statistics supplied by child guidance clinics are therefore unlikely to give an accurate picture of the general level of stress.

Ruth concludes: “We are trying to disseminate basic information about the requirements for heallhy emotional growth and development and to combine parental skills with those of experts to help parents understand the meaning of their own and their children's behaviour, so that they are not shattered by events erupting ‘out of the blue', like drug addiction, failure in later life, depression and suicide; wasted lives and ambitions. This process is also one of discovery for both parents and children and can be pleasurable and exciting for both.”

The single-parent father quoted earlier commented: “Twenty years ago businessmen scoffed at the idea of sending managers to business school, but today it is accepted that you train in order to become a more effective businessman. Today people may laugh at training parents to parent, but one day people will accept it as part of a normal education.”