Child Welfare and Social Policy: An Essential Reader

Abstract

by Harry Hendrick ( ed .) Bristol : Policy Press , 2005 ISBN 1861345666 , 558 pp , £25.00 (pb) This reader seeks to provide a broad framework within which to observe some of the complexities and ambiguities regarding children's well-being and to think about and analyse policy and practice. Aimed at students, it is intended to make them aware of different concepts and approaches used by researchers and policy makers and to stimulate their critical reflection on social policy for children. The 26 chapters were selected to provide a state-of-the-art picture of child welfare and social policy, so that together they show the variety of ways of thinking about children's well-being. Most were originally published in the period 1997–2003 and are drawn from a mixture of monographs, edited collections and journals. The book is in four parts. Part One highlights the historical antecedents of current debates, drawing out themes such as the perennial tension between family and state and the contrasting images of children as victims or threats. Part Two discusses concepts such as rights and social capital, describing the different ways in which children have been perceived and categorised in relation to welfare and how these play out in New Labour policy. Part Three sharpens the focus on policy and practice in 21st-Century Britain, with chapters on anti-social behaviour, health, disability, housing, education, young carers and day care. Part Four turns to the future and what it perceives as the growth of the ‘social investment state’ in which children are viewed as human capital. It would be easy to get lost amidst such disparate contributions, so Hendrick's overview chapters provide a useful map and give the book coherence. There are at least two recurring themes – one relating to research, the other to policy. First is the need for a more child-centred approach to social policy analysis, much work to date having considered policy and practice from the perspective of families, households, professional outputs or economics. Ridge (2005; Chapter 5) illustrates the value of this approach in her elaboration of children's real-life experience of poverty and social exclusion and elsewhere has done the same in relation to child support policy, with interesting results. The authors are particularly concerned to stress the importance of considering children's experience in the present, criticising the recurring portrayal in policy of children as ‘becomings’ not ‘beings’. This is exemplified in Nigel Thomas's discussion of the Children Act 1989 (Chapter 9) and Ruth Lister's powerful argument that policy in liberal welfare states such as the UK conceives of children as ‘citizen-workers of the future’ (Chapter 25). There has been a marked shift in recent years in this direction, informed by the body of work known collectively as childhood sociology or ‘the new social studies of childhood’. Second, the book neatly crystallises the underlying tension in much social policy for children between a needs-led or ‘welfare’ approach and a more rights-driven agenda. Jeremy Roche's analysis of recent legislation captures well the growing influence of rights but also the sense that its impact has been somewhat less than many advocates would wish (Chapter 12). Lansdown, meanwhile, defends the rights perspective from its critics, pointing to the way that adults abuse their power over children (Chapter 6), although one might of course ask if the decline in aspects of children's well-being in a supposed golden age for children's rights does not call the agenda into question. Significantly, John Davis and his colleagues (Chapter 18) contend that the shift from a medical or needs-led model of disability towards a more social or rights-based approach has been detrimental because the latter tends to view disabled children as an homogenous group and ignores differences and complexities. Most of the chapters acknowledge benefits that have accrued to children since Labour took office in 1997 while also expressing unease about the direction of some policies and calling for more progress. In the latter case, most of the authors are less forthcoming, which lends weight to Michael King's argument (Chapter 3) that there is a need to move beyond moral indignation to formulate practical measures aimed at changing behaviour towards children (p. 66). If it is short on solutions, however, this reader is rich in fascinating and thought-provoking accounts and cannot fail in its aim to encourage thinking theoretically and politically about child welfare – which Hendrick rightly identifies as being ‘in a rather elementary stage of development’ (p. 478).