which support is more valuable - family or health visitors?

[briarrose]

Hi all,

I'm having this debate with uni class mates, I have 2 kids and got buggery all help from my family when mine were small, health visitor was an angel, BUT I also think that some mums can be too dependent on health visitors, and therefore lose confidence in their own abilities as a parent.

I think that as a country now we don't put enough emphasis on parents using their initiative and bringing up their children the way it suits them and their family (I know, I know, there are child protection issues here, and some parents really do need a lot of support to ensure they and the children are safe/healthy etc, but i'm talking about kids not at risk)

So, how do we give parents back the confidence to do what they feel is right, without leaving them struggling? I'm basing this on the fact that I have received so many different opinions from so many different health professionals and it made me wonder what the right thing to do was, and I quite often just ended up doing what I felt anyway!

depends on what your fmaily is like and your HV

I think you answered yourself with your final statement of 'I often ended up doing what I felt anyway'.

I think the mums who become too dependent on helath visitors and even family ae the ones who start off with little confidence - perhaps with having no experience whatsoever of babies.

It's easy to assume the 'experts' or other mums/grandparents etc must know everything or the absolute best way of doing things when actually they can probably give the benefit of their knowledge or experience but ultimately the baby is yours and you would know the best way to do things for him/her etc.

well with me personally, my mum wasn't speaking to me, and although both my midwife and my health visitor were brilliant, they often told me the exact opposite to what the other had done. I had post natal depression too, so my confidence was low.

I just think that as parents we are not given enough status and responsibility nowadays, and with government initiatives designed to support parents they are actually having the effect of making parents feel less confident about their own rights, responsibilities and skills.

This combined with all the programmes where the parents hand their children over to "professionals" to be told how to raise them, makes some parents believe that it really is a simple as a "right and wrong" approach.

What is the ideal? I think it's more health visitors that are needed, so parents deal with just one. It's having too many opinions that makes parents confused I think