Supporting parents to support family life: a central challenge for family minded policy

Disabled parents can experience difficulties when trying to access services to support their parenting role, and this is exacerbated wherever disability continues to be articulated as if it were impairment and associated with a need for ‘care’. Disabled parents and their families experiences of services demonstrate that, for a family approach to be positively developed within social policy, individuals should be kept in sharp focus by policy makers, practitioners and researchers. Failure to do so can result in the problematisation of parents who have support requirements, itself a barrier to the development of appropriate services for parents and families.</jats:p

Introduction: Family minded policy and whole family practice - developing a critical research framework

During the first decade of the twenty-first century, UK policy and practice has become increasingly overt in its concern with families. In January 2010, the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF, 2010) launched the Support for All: The Families and Relationships Green Paper. In its Foreword, Ed Balls, the then Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, presented ‘Strong, stable families’ as ‘the bedrock of our society’, positioning the Green Paper as ‘supporting families to help themselves’, whilst ‘ensuring that all public services play their part in supporting strong and resilient family relationships’ (DCSF, 2010: 3). The Centre for Social Justice offered an immediate response with its own Green Paper on the Family, emphasising the role of ‘family breakdown’ as ‘the root’ of ‘pathways to poverty’ for many, as well as a barrier to appropriate childhood development and positive ‘future life outcomes’ (Centre for Social Justice, 2010: 4).</jats:p

Transmembrane fluoride transport: direct measurement and selectivity studies

Fluoride has been overlooked as a target in the development of synthetic anion transporters despite natural fluoride transport channels being recently discovered. In this paper we report the direct measurement of fluoride bilayer transport facilitated by a series of strapped calix[4]pyrroles and show that these compounds facilitate transport via an electrogenic mechanism (determined using valinomycin and monensin coupled transport assays and an additional osmotic response assay). An HPTS transport assay was used to quantify this electrogenic process and assess the interference of naturally occurring fatty acids with the transport process and Cl- over H+/OH- transport selectivity