Family and Child Welfare

Family and Child Welfare 3 (3+0)

Lesson 10 : Roles and Responsibilities of Parents and Children

The parental Role

The parents are the principal emotional support system available to the child. They provide the child with comfort, praise, empathic understanding, sym­pathy, and affection. They are a source of unconditional positive regard for the child in sensitive response to his individualized needs. Providing care, emotional support, direction, and guidance over the period of the child's dependency, the parent provides the child with the sense of per­manence and associated stability and continuity in relationships needed for healthy development.
The acceptable behaviour associated with the performance of a given role includes rights (the behaviour expected from parents) and obligations (the behaviour that others expect to perform towards them). In relation to child, the parent’s role are:

1. He is expected to provide an income that will permit him to meet the needs of the child for food, clothing, shelter, education, health care and social and recreational activities.
2. He is expected to provide for the emotional needs of the child-to-the love, security, affection and the emotional support necessary for the healthy development of the child.
3. He is expected to provide necessary stimulation for normal intellectual, social and spiritual development if the family believes this to be important. The parent should see that a school is available and that the child goes to school, that a peer group is available and that the child is encouraged to play that religious training is available and that the child is encouraged to participate.
4. He must help to socialize the child. Socialization is the process of introducing into the social group and teaching them the behavior that is customary and acceptable to the group. The parent in other words, has the responsibility for changing a biological organization into a human being.
5. He must discipline the child and keep him from developing patterns of behavior and attitudes disapproved by the society.
6. He must protect the child from physical, emotional or social harm.
7. He must present a model for the identification of sex-linked behavior.
8. He must help to maintain family interaction on a stable, satisfying basis so that an effort is made to meet the significant needs of all the members of the family. The parent must help to resolve discomforts, frictions and must meet emotional needs with accepting, affectionate responses.
9. He must provide a fixed place and abode for the child and provide a clearly defined ‘place’ for him in the community. Thus the child comes to know who he is and to whom he belongs and ultimately comes to achieve a stable self-identification.
10. The parent stand as an intermediary between the child and the outer world, defending the child’s rights in the community and protecting the child from urgent demands by the community.

These role functions applicable to the parental pair, the distinctive role responsibilities of father and mother. Instead of the separate and distinct cultural expectations of behavior set associated with the father’s role, there is a movement toward an undifferentiated set of parental behaviours attitudes and values that is shared, implemented without gender distinction by both parents. Not only are the duties and privileges of the father and the mother undergoing change, with assignment or greater sharing of the responsibilities but there is also a reformulation and the respective responsibilities between parents.

The child’s needs be adequately met in a variety of different family structures. The role responsibilities can be implemented by a woman in a single-parent family acting as both mother and father, by a father in a single-parent acting as father and mother. It merely indentifies role responsibilities that must be implemented if the child’s needs are to be adequately met. If however, the role arrangements established to meet the child’s needs fall short in any one of the variety of different family forms, child welfare services would be appropriate source of help.