Abstract
Home-Start is a family support charity whose delivery model is a national and global example of how targeted volunteer support can benefit parents, carers and children experiencing difficult times, in both domestic and other spaces. Parenting support continues to be a key policy area for the current UK government and other policy-makers across the Global North. In this article we draw on qualitative findings from an ethnography of a Home-Start organisation in a city in the north of England. The theoretical framework of liminality, a space between social structures, allows for an appreciation of the ambiguous nature of supporting parents in the private domestic spaces, and the ways in which this support enables parents and families to move forward. The article has broader implications for global social care and social work practice, specifically demonstrating the importance of the relationships between parents and volunteers in the every day, and contributes to the literature on liminality.
Highlights
Since 2010 there have been austerity measures in the UK and across the Global North, instigated by the national and global financial crises (Clarke and Newman, 2012), and ‘politically reframed from an economic issue to a problem that can be blamed on the welfare state and its dependents’ (Fisher et al, 2014: 39)
One volunteer (V2) stated: ‘...after I’d finished, about a month later I rang her up and said I’d come round and I said, have you been to any Sure Starts, and I could tell she hadn’t, and that was sad because that was the whole point, really, of going, was to get her to make friends.’. In this theme we have discussed the work of Home-Start as operating in a liminal space where volunteers work with parents who are between coping and not coping. In most instances this appears to prevent ‘not coping’ to the point where the intervention of statutory services is necessary.The findings from this study suggest that liminality is helpful in highlighting that the mothers experienced positive transitions that were supported by Home-Start volunteers. we are unable to provide evidence for this, it is implied in the reports of families, volunteers, staff and trustees and further in the research of Hermanns et al (2013)
While there are empirical studies that have drawn on the theoretical framework of liminality, there is a gap on the provision and receipt of parenting support in the literature that has foregrounded liminality, and threshold concepts
Summary
Since 2010 there have been austerity measures in the UK and across the Global North, instigated by the national and global financial crises (Clarke and Newman, 2012), and ‘politically reframed from an economic issue to a problem that can be blamed on the welfare state and its dependents’ (Fisher et al, 2014: 39). For this article we deliberately chose to focus on liminality as a lens to understand families’ perspectives of support. This was influenced by the thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006) that highlighted the in-between nature of Home-Start volunteers. In this article we draw on qualitative research undertaken between 2013 and 2014 in a city in the north of England with a Home-Start organisation that provides voluntary support for families experiencing difficulties with children aged five and under. We contribute to the health and social care literature through our focus on liminal spaces of parenting support, and argue that the concept of liminality allows for an understanding of everyday experiences of family support in domestic spaces provided by a voluntary organisation
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