Hi! I’m Doris, from France. I have been an intern at Family by Family for three months. I have found it much more confronting than the two other internships that I have done before in France and in Morocco. I have learnt very much and have changed my mindsets. This blog is about how Family by Family made me realise how someone can try hard to be a good parent but not achieve this because of their circumstances.


I don’t know where this weird idea came into my mind from but before my internship at Family by Family, I thought that parents who behaved inappropriately with their kids were “bad people” who didn’t like their kids, and above all didn’t even try to be “good parents”. When I saw someone slap their kids for nothing, say mean things to them or put a “dog harness” around their kids’ neck, I couldn’t stand it. Although I thought I was empathetic, including having studied social work, I couldn’t help judging those parents. I am now quite ashamed to confess that the only thing I thought was that they were bad parents, they were destroying their kids’ lives and the best thing that I could hope is that they had their children removed.


It is true that parents experiencing tough times don’t provide their kids with the best environment ever. However, after absorbing people’s personal and family stories, I have figured out that there is always an explanation for people’s behaviour with their kids, either past or current. I have learnt that there are usually two elements that can prevent someone from looking after their kids as well as they would like. Either their current stressful situation or the way they were parented, often it is both.


First of all, living in a stressful situation makes it harder to look after your kids. Before this internship, I knew that the environment in which someone lives impacts on their way to parent their kids of course. However, I didn’t realise the extent of it. I was not aware of the amount of deterrents that living in a stressful situation generates. Tough times put parents in a situation of multiple incapacities where daily life things, that can appear as easy for other people, become unreachable because of time, stress, money, energy or patience. Unless you have experienced this first hand, it is hard to guess. I have come across plenty of family situations and have asked myself multiple questions. If I were a single Mum, would I take time to play with my child when I come back exhausted from my third part-time job? If I were depressed, would I be able to think about how my kids can get more positive stuff in their lives? As someone on a tight budget, would I make eating dinner together a priority if I relied on community services to feed my kids? Probably not. I just wouldn’t have the possibility, the energy or the patience to do so. Yet, it’s what is crucial as a family. When families experience tough times, they are actually too busy with matters that stress them out to be able to care for their kids as they would like.


The second thing that I have learnt is that not having been raised with positive routines can prevent someone from setting them up for their own family. In fact, struggling parents usually don’t realise how important settled routines are for making a happy family. Parents experiencing hardship in raising their kids actually often didn’t have settled routines when they were kids themselves. Then, basic little things that I think of as normal, like having dinner together, taking time to show interest in your kid, playing with them, reading them a bedtime story are not something natural for them. Additionally, realising how important routines are is not enough. One thing that has really struck me is how some people are really willing to be good parents but just don’t know how. For instance, one of our seeking family’s goal is to work on kids’ behaviour, notably through finding new ways to communicate within their own family. This single Mum attended heaps of parenting classes and is obviously trying her hardest to set up good routines. At night, she gets her kids to sit around the table for dinner, as what professionals and social workers advised her to do. Yet, she is unable to connect with her kids: her family don’t know what to talk about because they haven’t been taught how to do so. 


My experience at Family by Family has allowed me to have a deeper look at the struggling families’ daily life. It has entailed a big change in my mindsets, one that I am really happy to have made. I have met several parents who do love their kids and want to be good carers but just do not know how. Then, being a good parent is not only a love or a will matter. Parenting is not always that natural. One needs to have been shown how to set up good routines and behaviours either by their own parents or by an organisation which can provide them with a bit of support, like Family by Family. Similar to what Simone de Beauvoir said, one is not born, but rather becomes, a parent.

After months of planning and negotiating, we're pleased to announce that we've packed our bags and moved east! Monday, 12th May 2012 marks a key milestone as we open shop in the new TACSI HQ at:

 

[img]http://www.tacsi.org.au/assets/Photos/Blog/_resampled/resizedimage250156-TACSI-HQ.jpg[/img]

 


[b]Level 1,
279 Flinders Street
ADELAIDE  SA  5000[/b]


[b] [/b]


 


 


[b]Our new telephone number is +61 8 7325 4999[/b].

 

The new TACSI HQ includes a range of exciting features including offices, a design studio, meeting rooms, a dedicated events space, a co-working facility and more!

The events space will be available for hire from June 2012, and can accommodate up to 80 people. Enquiries can be made by emailing [url=mailto:info@tacsi.org.au]info@tacsi.org.au[/url]

Keep an eye on the website for photos and information on the all important office-warming party!

 

[b]
[/b]

[img]http://www.tacsi.org.au/assets/Uploads/_resampled/resizedimage600545-Flinders-Street-Map.png[/img]TACSI HQ / Level 1, 279 Flinders Street Adelaide SA 5000

[img]http://www.tacsi.org.au/assets/Graphics/Logos/_resampled/resizedimage200102-SIXlogoDarkblueCMYK.jpg[/img]The field of social innovation is rapidly expanding - and the [url=http://www.socialinnovationexchange.org]Social Innovation Exchange[/url] (SIX) is keeping pace and becoming ever more global. This year, TACSI is very excited to be partnering with SIX to host the 5th annual global gathering in Adelaide.


This year’s Summer School will shine a light on growing pains. How are we growing and sustaining our innovations...our organisations...and the social innovation field?


We’re interested in exploring the SIX community's collective wisdom around issues of finance, talent, methods and partnerships to name a few, so pack your ideas, stories and practical examples!


As with other SIX events, the Summer School will bring together a unique mix of inspiring people from all over the world and from a wide range of sectors. Policy makers will join with leading thinkers, practitioners, academics and funders of social innovation.


We look forward to seeing many of you again, and meeting many of you for the first time in Adelaide.


 


SAVE THE DATE


5th Annual SIX Summer School


26-28th November 2012


Adelaide, Australia

 

Some weeks, you put the intellectual part of your brain to use. Other weeks, you put the practical part of your brain to use. This week was all about the practical: [url=http://www.tacsi.org.au/[sitetree_link id=68]]organising a free family festival [/url]this Sunday from 12-3pm in the Rajah Street Reserve, Marion.

 

I scoured the yellow pages to find experts who could teach cupcake decorating, kite making, cartoon drawing, and coffee making. I taped posters to trees and handed out flyers at schools, cafes, gyms, libraries, laundry mats, corner stores, supermarkets, and health clinics. Carolyn visited nearly every Salvos for spoons and forks to bash together wind chimes, bought tents and blackboard paint at the hardware store, and found a masseuse. Chris hunched over the computer designing festival programmes, brochures, activities, and materials. Had we written our team job spec this week, it would have said 'marketing' 'outreach' 'mobilisation' 'event planning' and 'logistics management.' I worried Carolyn, coming from a high-pressured social work position, would feel this was all a bit beneath her: so banal compared to the everyday urgency of keeping families intact.

 

So where's the social innovation?

 

The family festival isn't the innovation. But learning what attracts and how to engage families is critical for finding the innovation. Our ethnographic work has showed us how challenging it is for families to create the time and space for learning, discovering, and trying out new things together. By putting on a festival, we hope to open up that time and space and start a conversation about how we might enable this on a more day-to-day basis.

 

At the festival, we'll have an ideas tent where families can bid for $100 to 'boost' their family. It's grant-making at a family level. We hope to get a sense of what families want to do, and what they see as being good for their family. Past projects have taught has how valuable it is to identify the upper bounds of people's thinking and experience: what do families think is possible? How can we then broaden their sense of possibility? All of us can only aspire to the things that we know exist.

 

This is also true of professionals and academics. For an hour on Monday, I tried to switch on the intellectual part of my brain. We met with folks from the University of South Australia for a chat about how to build the capacity of social work, psychology, design, public policy, and anthropology students and faculty to work in a ground-up, experimental, and interdisciplinary way. First step: introducing students and faculty to moving beyond the labels, categories and silos that define disciplines. We're wanting to find those people in academic institutions who are willing to blur boundaries and redefine what they do by the problems they jointly help to solve.

 

We're finding solving problems is all about going back to basics: to person-to-person interaction. Not person to researcher or person to professional. Sometimes that leads us to pin posters to a tree and cold call businesses from the yellow pages just to create an opportunity for that interaction and a chance to change how we think about the solutions to big social challenges.

 

 

 

 

Two years of work with over 100 families in the City of Marion, South Australia, tells us that [url=http://familybyfamily.org.au/]Family by Family[/url] is a promising practice. A practice that fills a real need. A practice that engages families who don't typically sign up to anything. A practice that enables families to lead change.

Too many promising practices never spread. Those that do spread are too often ineffective. Practice is picked up with the best of intentions and imposed on a new area, without first understanding what it would take to work in that particular area.

We believe that simply transferring the Family by Family model from the south of Adelaide to the north would not have worked.

Funding from Playford's [url=http://anglicare-sa.org.au/]Communities for Children Plus[/url] and [url=http://www.playfordalive.com.au/]Playford Alive[/url] not only gives us a chance to adapt the Family by Family model to Playford, but it has also enabled us to develop a methodology to spread Family by Family to communities across Australia.

That methodology starts with what we call scoping[i].[/i] Scoping doesn't aim to re-invent the model in each new area, but to reshape it so that Family by Family is a truly local network of families helping families move towards thriving.

Understanding local families is the first stage of scoping. Over the past 3 months we've run 5 pop up stalls, met over 100 families in Playford, and hung out with 15 of those families in their homes and in the community.

This report is the story of the families we've met, what we've learned from them and how we're adapting the Family by Family model to fit Playford.

It's also the story of what we've learned about scoping, and how we'll be refining our approach to scoping next time around.

[url=http://www.tacsi.org.au/[sitetree_link id=208]][img]http://www.tacsi.org.au/assets/News/_resampled/resizedimage422600-Optimized-ReportCover.png[/img][/url]


A copy of this report is available to download from our [url=http://www.tacsi.org.au/[sitetree_link id=208]]Publications[/url] page.