Parental Help-Seeking and the Moral Order. Notes for Policy-Makers and Parenting Practitioners on ‘the First Port of Call’ and ‘No One to Turn To’

The topic ‘help-seeking’ is of international interest. However, there is only avery limited literature concerning help-seeking in child welfare and a distinctdearth of studies that have examined the social organisation of parents’decisions to seek help. Recent developments in child welfare services in Englandand Wales have seen the introduction of a raft of initiatives that aim todeliver parenting support to a broader range of parents; however, theseinitiatives are not well grounded in an evidence base concerning parentalhelp-seeking. Focusing on the organisation of talk-in-interaction in interviewsand focus groups, this study examined parents’ normative and inter-subjectiveunderstandings about help-seeking. The study found that when considering thewelfare problems of parenting (variously described as ‘domestic’, ‘normal’ or‘on the home front’), participants routinely made relevant the binary‘inside/outside’ the family, indicating the central (normative) relevance of thecategory ‘family’ for this kind of support. Outside (professional) help was verymuch a residual option, only to be considered on the basis of ‘no-one to turnto’. The findings are discussed in relation to national strategies that seek tonormalise support for parenting and issues of international relevance to do withprofessional identification and diagnosis of need.