A visit to Australia (February 12-16, 1979) by Dr. Masamba ma Mpolo, Secretary of the Office of Family Education, World Council of Churches, Geneva, has stimulated great interest in the Family Power: Social Change project, which is part of the family ministries programme of the World Council of Churches.

The project is rooted in insights I find exciting — the belief that families need not just succumb to external pressures and become victims of outside forces; they need not wait for commercial interests, television and radio, newspapers and magazines, films and advertisements, patronizing and matronizing social service bodies to tell them what to do, what to think, what to buy, what value systems to uphold, what goals for living to accept. They can become more self-reliant, more liberated, less other directed, be makers of history. Fatalistic, hand-wringing despair can be replaced by courageous grappling with issues, in a spirit of hope. In line with the Old Testament prophets, families can both denounce evil elements involving injustice and manipulation, and can announce new possibilities for a more truly human society (see Paulo Freire, Cultural Action for Freedom, Penguin).

Social policy may be defined in a general sense as the conscious process by which members of a society, or some large sub-section of a society, collectively seek enduring solutions to the problems that affect them. Social policy refers particularly, but not only, to the actions of governments and to the activities of large organisations and institutions. It is now generally accepted that the concerns of social policy have at least to do with questions of social justice, equity and environmental protection, although there is much debate about specific application of these values or of the lower order values that might be derived from them

An extensive literature on social policy now exists. This literature deals with the principles or philosophy underlying the process of formal policy making, the development and current extent of policies in selected nations or in relation to specific population groups or social problems and also deals in a normative way with the actual activities to be undertaken in the formulation and implementation of social policies.

The subject of parents and children is so immense and so much discussed that it takes a certain effrontery to write yet another article on it. I do, however, have a slightly original slant in that I am not concerned so much with how parents affect their children, but with the effects that children have on their parents.

Practically everybody has strong impressions of their own parents, even if they are not parents themselves, so that everyone has some kind of experience of parent child relationships. Sometimes this experience leads to understanding and insight: sometimes it leads to distortion and bias. In order to move away from the sort of discussion that is either an exchange, or a confrontation of various people's experiences, I propose to use two different approaches. The first will try to elucidate the structure of the dominant contemporary mode of parents-children relationships. The second will examine alternative ways of viewing parent-child relationships.

This paper traces the development of Parents Anonymous in Australia. It was found that it was not possible to simply transfer the American system into the Australian context.

The major feature of the Australian PA is the highly successful telephone and home visiting service. In contrast, the groups have been successful for only short periods and in only few cases.

The reasons for these differences are described with reference to

(i) the wider social context of both government and public awareness of child abuse.

(ii) the changing nature of the interaction between professionals and members, and the need to distinguish between “deprofessionalisation” and “laissez-faire”.

(iii) the changing nature of the distinction between volunteers and members and the developing awareness of the symbiotic nature of giving and receiving help.

The Parents' Help Centre is a child abuse prevention unit which began operation in Perth on 9.1.1976. The Centre is administered by the Western Australian Department for Community Welfare and is jointly funded by the Office of Child Care and Department for Community Welfare.

The Centre aims at preventing the physical abuse of pre-school children by offering a non-professional family-type support service in a warm accepting atmosphere to parents who are having difficulty in controlling their behaviour towards their (pre-school) children. The Centre is available to parents 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Behaviour change can and should be designed for children in a residential care setting/s. The achievement of these behavioural goals will be contingent on the skills of the cottage parents.

The purpose of this paper is to describe a planned ‘change’ programme for a behaviour problem child in a residential cottage home.

It should be noted that this is an outline of treatment for the specific behaviour problems displayed by a young child and in no way discounts the importance of fulfilling the physical and emotional needs of the child.

We will be looking at the specific skills required in modifying behaviour, how they are applied to both extinction of inappropriate behaviour and teaching of new and appropriate behaviour.

On March 20th of this year, it will be exactly five years since the Victorian Minister for Health released the Report of the Consultative Council on Pre-School Child Development, a document which was then adopted “in principle” as government policy for the State.

This report yielded, amongst many detailed recommendations, the concept of an Early Childhood Development Complex (ECDC) which has since been implemented in practice in a number of different places throughout Victoria.

As the research officer to the Consultative Council, I attended, from my appointment, all its deliberations and discussions, meetings, weekend workshops (some residential) and had the unique opportunity of witnessing the meshing of these experienced minds.

We are all concerned for the potentially damaging effects of long term residential care. I propose, in my first paper, to look at this change and its implications for residential work and residential workers, and in the second paper to concentrate more on those for whom I feel long term residential treatment is essential if they are not to become increasingly anti-social and eventually institutionally dependent.