Parental competence

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. The book 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.

Further information:

'Parental competence and parents with learning difficulties', Child and Family Social Work, 1(2), 1996, pp. 81–86.

'Parenting in context: policy, practice and the Pollocks', Child and Family Social Work, 1(2), 1996, pp. 93–96.