THE GREAT YARMOUTH Father’s Project (GYFP) is presented as a community psychology example of ‘formulation beyond therapy’. A co-produced formulation is described that attempts to broaden under- standing of father’s experiences of early-years child and family services

McCauley, C

Smithhurst, S

Taggart, D

University of Essex Research Repository

   “I’M PAYING FOR MY SON’S UPBRINGING WITH OTHER PEOPLE’S WAGES”.COMMUNITY PSYCHOLOGY PRAXIS IN A SURE START CHILDREN’S CENTRE: THE GREAT YARMOUTH FATHER’S PROJECT Taggart, Danny; McCauley, Carl & Smithhurst, Sue dtaggart@essex.ac.uk Academic Director, Doctorate in Clinical Psychology, School of Health and Human Sciences, University of Essex  2  Summary The Great Yarmouth Father’s Project (GYFP)  is  presented as a community psychology example of ‘ formulation beyond therapy. A co-produced formulation is  described that attempts to broaden understanding of father’s experiences of early-years chi ld  and family services.    Context  As the person responsible for the t it le quote could attest to,  it  was a tr icky t ime to be a father in the late 2000’s,  part icularly  i f  you did not l ive ful l-t ime with your chi ldren. Senator Barack Obama in a widely public ised speech to a  Chicago church audience lamented “too many fathers a lso are missing…They have abandoned their responsibi l i t ies,  acting l ike boys instead of men. And the foundat ions of our famil ies are weaker because of it .”  (Barack Obama, 2008).  Closer to home a few years later ,  newly e lected Brit ish Prime Minister David Cameron was responding to the London Riots.  In a speech Cameron singled out absent fathers as being behind the social  decay that led so many young people onto the streets that summer;  “ I  don’t  doubt that many of the rioters out last  week have no father at  home… if  we want to have any hope of mending our broken society,  family and parenting is  where we’ve got to start.”  (David Cameron, 2011).  The Prime Minister ’s  analys is  that poor parenting was at the heart of the ‘broken society’,  was further supported by the policy response to the riots by the Casey Report (2012) which ident if ied nine fami l ia l  constructs that can be used to identi fy ‘troubled famil ies ’  and a psycho-social  intervention was developed which continues to be delivered in areas of high deprivat ion today. It  appeared that the ‘absent father’  had replaced the ‘s ingle mother’  as  an explanatory  trope for a l l  k inds of societal  i l ls .  What was less present  was an understanding of where these fathers had gone and whether they recognised themselves in this caricature.  Since their inception in 1998, Sure Start  Chi ldren’s Centres have been bedevi l led by a lack lustre engagement by fathers in their  ear ly-years programs (L loyd, O’Brien & Lewis,  2003).  This coupled with influentia l  research suggesting that father’s involvement in early-years services for their  chi ldren has an impact on chi ld development (F louri  & Buchanan, 2004),  means that targeting this has been a national prior ity.  Interventions have focused on the employment of male father’s workers and attempts to improve the quality of father-infant interact ion using attachment based models,  parenting programs and psycho-educat ion (L loyd, O’Brien & Lewis,  2003).  However,  what happens when some of the root causes of father’s al ienation extends beyond dif f icult ies in the fami ly system that dominates psychological  theories  of infant development?  The Great Yarmouth Father’s Project (GYFP)  was set up in 2010 against this  3backdrop. It  is  a Community Psychology project (Orford, 2008)  that was co-founded by a cl inical  psychologist  (DT) and local  fathers (one of whom is CMcC) and has involved e lements of Part icipatory Action Research (PAR, Kagan, 2012),  local  pol it ical  act iv ism and an educat ional program developed with a community researcher (SS).   In this area the local  Chi ldren’s Centres struggled, l ike elsewhere, to meaningful ly  engage fathers in early years parent ing services.  They had used a range of off  the shelf  parenting programs (see the BPS discussion paper Technique is  not Enough, 2012 for a crit ique of using programmatic intervent ions in disadvantaged communities),  inc luding some specif ica l ly  for fathers (McAl l ister  & Burgess,  2012) to varying degrees of success  but consistently found that the interventions fai led to reach the most marginal ised and in need famil ies .  One of the authors (DT) worked on behalf  of a mental  health trust on a joint project with a local  Children’s Centre. The agreement was that a project  would be established that would address issues of concern for local  fathers and that it  would be co-produced with fathers participat ing as volunteers,  not cl ients .  The approach was formulated using community psychology models that prior it ised intervent ion at a socia l  rather than individual level,  but with the aim that there would be concomitant  psychological  benefits for the fathers and their famil ies (see Holland, 1992 for an influent ial  mult i - level  approach) .     The idea that  the members of the GYFP themselves might be in a posit ion to undertake research into issues facing local  fathers,  and then that they could act upon these f indings was in it ia l ly  met with some disbelief  within the group. It  was only when the rarefied, professionally  regulated jargon of research and intervent ion were broken down that they could see a role for themselves.  Therefore,  below sections are t it led in a  way that a ims to reflect how the group understood their task.   Ask questions… The fathers registered as volunteers and undertook a community research tra ining program which both equipped them to engage in PAR and to gain a valuable qualif ication. The research component of the GYFP focused on local  fathers’  relationships with services for chi ldren and famil ies .  Data was col lected us ing semi-structured interv iews by the researchers with over 40 local  fathers .  The f indings revealed a strong narrat ive among fathers that they felt  excluded from early-years chi ld-care services and often had dif f icult  re lationships  with the majority female socia l  care and health staff.  Fathers described feel ing cr it ic ised for not fulf i l l ing both provider and chi ld care funct ions within their  fami ly.  Based on the f inding that fathers have been excluded and had l imited experience of working with profess ionals in the parenting f ield,  they cal led for fathers to be shown respect and not judged according to a female centric parenting style.  It  was particularly  chal lenging for those fathers that were non-resident and for some who were involved or had been involved in chi ld protection proceedings.  These fathers expressed the view that they felt  judged by their past and seen as aggressive. To them it  seemed l ike there was no second chance to  prove  4themselves as capable  and loving parents but were perceived as “t icking t ime bombs of domestic v io lence wait ing to happen”.    Make sense of answers  Insert  Figure 1 about here  The above f indings and analysis  by the GYFP were used to develop a psychological  formulation represented in Figure 1.  The formulation init ia l ly  focuses on the immediate dyadic relationship between father and chi ld  then the proximal family  5system, as is  typical  of some approaches to fatherhood research (Braungart-Rieker,  Courtney & Garwood, 1999).  The next sphere of influence incorporates  relationships with early-years health and social  care professionals,  which in the research f indings were often described as confl ictual  and mutually  misunderstanding. Again this aspect of the formulation can be re lated to exist ing l iterature (Scourfield,  Cheung & Macdonald,  2014).  However,  the influences that dista l ly  yet s ignif icant ly affect the more proximal power re lationships represent a departure from other models (see Smai l ,  2005 for a discuss ion of dista l  and proximal power).  Here,  the often masked social  factors are treated as constitutive and not merely attendant influences. In other words,  the socia l  system in which these fathers l ive is  not treated as a set of psychological  variables to be separated out and categorised, to be re-imported later  in a decontextual ized way as mechanisms to help expla in how these men think,  feel  and behave. Rather it  is  argued, s imilarly  to other community psychology models,  that the social  context cannot be separated from how these fathers  experience the world as embodied, social ,  sense making beings.  Distal  forces of the poli t ica l  economy, public  services that increasingly indiv idualise socia l  problems affecting famil ies and repackage them as ‘psychological ’  and contradictory discourses of what it  means to be a ‘good father’  have al l  converged to constitute the subject of fatherhood both for the men themselves,  their  famil ies and professional  systems charged with their care and control.   Given the above, and the l imited and l imit ing roles consequently avai lable to local  fathers under these social  condit ions,  the task for the GYFP was to unmask the essent ial ly  socia l  nature of their  predicament and to construct alternative ident it ies and communicate these to their  famil ies,  the community and public  services.  The task was therefore not to change the ways these fathers thought about themselves,  their  world or  their  fami l ies,  as might be the case with some psychological  interventions,  but rather  to highl ight their  work as an i l lustration for themselves and others of what can be possible given conducive social  condit ions and theorised col lective action.  Act… An init ial  and signi f icant impact that the GYFP had was in its  expl ic it  reject ion of an individual ised,  atomised and disembodied formulation of fatherhood as ‘problem’. This ‘boundary cr it ique’ (Midgley,  Munlo & Brown, 1998) insisted that social ,  mater ial  and polit ica l  inf luences were at the heart of any discussion of parenting. It  chal lenged a fami l iar pattern of v ict im blaming that  so hamstrings contemporary socia l  pol icy,  part icularly  in the areas of  chi ld and family (Gil l ies ,  2008) and welfare (see Perkins,  2016 for an example of how psychological  theory can be used to harmful policy ends).  Connected to this was an alternative ‘solution’ that the GYFP offered. Rather than relying upon expert knowledge from professionals ,  the fathers became the answer. Through peer sol idarity and reciprocal  educat ion they tackled a wide range of issues together including,  in  no particular order,  adult  mental  health problems, chi ld behavioural  issues,  interest  6rates on payday loans,  welfare c laims, how to navigate chi ld protection proceedings,  adult  l iteracy and relationships  with their partners .  What unif ied this disparate range of issues was the recognit ion within the project that al l  of  these things were relevant in thinking about fatherhood and family l i fe,  and that together they had expertise to offer one another.   A further contribut ion was the points of contact the GYFP had with academic researchers.  A productive tension developed here whereby project members would quest ion the authority of what they perceived of as outsiders looking in but were then able to offer researchers a more contextual ised understanding. This has gone on to further col laborat ions with project members offering consultation to academic projects and providing teaching on how to work with fathers to tra inee cl in ical  psychologists.  What was a lso of interest in these points of contact was that while academic research and pol icy influence had undoubtedly reaped benef its for fathers (Paternity R ights being an obvious example),  the fathers did not know that this was so. Through these exchanges there were therefore opportunit ies for fathers to gain an understanding of how invisible processes such as social  pol icy could impact on their immediate experiences and so open up possibi l it ies of more active engagement with other forms of democratic participation.  Conclusion As can be seen the GYFP offers an example of ‘ formulat ion beyond therapy’ .  Using a community psychology framework,  a group of fathers worked together with a psychologist  and community researcher to understand and act upon their environment. The project avoided the “cult  of the immediacy’  (Sedgwick,  1981) whereby many interventions aimed at changing father’s behaviour  stop their analys is  at  the individual or immediate system level.  It  a lso attempted to avoid the reinstatement of social  problems as psychological  ones via the back door (see Wilkinson & Pickett,  2009 for a high profi le example of this) ,  without hopeful ly  denying the very real  experiences of these men and their famil ies .  The project was not without its  fai lures,  not least of which were the stabi l ity  of some of the relationships that the project was founded upon and the de facto exclus ion of mothers and chi ldren from partic ipation.  To return f inal ly  to the t it le quote,  the GYFP in itse lf  was unable to remedy the real ity for  many fathers that they have to l ive with the loss of providing for their  family (as it  happens though the part icular father quoted above did f ind work) .  Instead the project attempted to complicate the question by broadening the terms of reference for how such a situation can arise in the UK today, and in doing so it  offered these fathers the opportunity to construct other social ly  useful  roles through the l i fe of the project.      7References Braungart-Rieker,  J . ,  Courtney, S.  & Garwood, M. (1999).  Mother- and Father-Infant Attachment:  Famil ies in context .  Journal of  Family Psychology. 13 (4),  535-553.  Cameron, D. (2011).  PM’s speech on the f ightback after  the r iots.  [Speech delivered in Oxfordshire in the wake of UK unrest] .  Retr ieved from https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pms-speech-on-the-f ightback-after-the-r iots  Casey,  L .  (2012).  Listening to troubled fami l ies.  Department  for Communities and Local  Government. Retrieved from https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/f i le/6151/2183663.pdf  Davies,  F. ,  McDonald,  L .  & Axford, N. (2012).  Technique is  not enough: A framework for  ensuring evidence based parenting programs are social ly inclusive.  The  Brit ish Psychological  Society .  Flour i ,  E .  & Buchanan,  A. (2004). Ear ly father's  and mother 's  involvement and chi ld's  later educational outcomes. Br it ish Journal of Educat ional Psychology,  74 (2),  141-153.  Gi l l ies,  V.  (2008).  Perspectives on parenting responsibi l ity:  contextualizing values  and pract ices.  Journal of  Law and Society,  35 (1),  95-112.  Holland, S.  (1992) From social  abuse to social  action:  A neighbourhood psychotherapy and social  act ion project for  women.  In:  J .M. Ussher,  & P. Nicolson, (eds),  1992. Gender Issues in Cl in ical  Psychology. London: Routledge. Chapter 3,  p 68 – 77 Kagan, C.  (2012).  Participatory act ion research and community psychology. [Book chapter translated from Spanish] Retr ieved from http://www.compsy.org.uk/PAR%20kagan%20final%20for%20web.pdf  L loyd, N.,  O’Brien, M. & Lewis,  C.  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‘I’m paying for my son’s upbringing with other people’s wages’. Community psychology praxis in a Sure Start Children’s Centre: The Great Yarmouth Father’s Project

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‘I’m paying for my son’s upbringing with other people’s wages’. Community psychology praxis in a Sure Start Children’s Centre: The Great Yarmouth Father’s Project

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