Family centre

The Family Centre.The Social Services in England has established Family Centres to help families to grow and evolve in a healthy manner. Family Centres offer a range of different kinds of community based support for families, which includes childcare, drop-in facilities for parents, counselling, and training. These centres have three main features:-1. They are located in neighbourhoods where there is a marked incident of social problems that are associated with high rates of receiving children into care.2. They are intended to draw out the family’s strengths instead of focusing on their problems.3. Their services are accessible to local communities and responsive to people’s needs.Research psychologists at the Family Centre have worked with the families of children who have been physically or emotionally abused, neglected, or who were failing to thrive. The objective of the Family Centre was to provide a warm atmosphere of re-parenting for all: for the mothers in the hope of making up for the emotional poverty they may have suffered throughout their lives, and for the children, so that they might be able to develop in a loving atmosphere, in which emotional damage arising from their home environment might be ameliorated.Even though the children who attended the Family Centre were to a large extent protected from physical harm, they appeared to show behaviour that indicated that aspects of their home life were continuing to exert a deleterious effect on their behaviour and development. Therefore, it was felt that physical protection alone was not sufficient for the child’s well-being.When the children arrived at the Family Centre they ran into the arms of the nursery staff and fell into their daily routine. In observing the way that the children played, there were many aspects of their behaviourism that indicated possible problems. Most of the children spent a considerable amount of time in nursery not playing; for several, the emotional need to be cuddled and held by staff took precedence over play. Other children shunned adults or actively resisted attempts to who them interest or affection.Fantasy play, which is necessary in the exploration of possibilities and alternative ways of seeing the world, was almost non-existent among the children. Again, this may well reflect the emotional limitations of the children’s home lives and the lack of shared creativity and play between parent and child.The children’s interactions with their mothers were confined to lunch-times, and the majority of the mothers showed very limited amounts of interaction with their children. The mothers generally relinquished care to the nursery staff, despite efforts tot he contrary, and showed little interest of involvement with their children.Many of the children studied showed signs of aggression, hostility and overly deviant behaviour.