1.
HCS321 Week 3
Community Contexts of Child Development

2.
Overview
Review
It takes a village to raise a child
Interconnecting Families,
Community and Disadvantage
Ecomaps

3.
Review
 Family is however we describe or define it, our most
effective mechanism for raising children.
 Bio-social relationships are critical but so is altruism
and reciprocity between members. This is emotional,
material and economic in nature.
 Genograms are a tool to clarify relationships for
people, they can inherit subjectivity of the drawer
and viewer.

4.
It takes a village.....
 Hilary Rodham Clinton in 1971 used the expression;
it takes a (whole) village to raise a child, derived
from a proverb of the Igbo and Yoruba people of
Nigeria, while working as a human rights lawyer in
the United Nations.
 What is the village – is it Society, or Community or
Neighbourhood?
 How does it work?

5.
Interconnecting Family and Community and Poverty
"I think we've been through a period where too many
people have been given to understand that if they
have a problem, it's the government's job to cope
with it…. They're casting their problem on society.
And, you know, there is no such thing as society.
There are individual….., and there are families. And
no government can do anything except through
people, and people must look to themselves first. It's
our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look
after our neighbor. ……There's no such thing as
entitlement, unless someone has first met an
obligation.”
Margaret Thatcher 1987

6.
Family Impoverishment = Community Disadvantage
Family
• Limits of ability
• Limits of opportunity
• Limits of motivation
• Collapse of resilience
Community
• Limits of wealth
• Limits of resources
• Limits of creativity
• Loss of Fidelity/Identity

7.
Inversely….
Community
 Loss Identity
 Loss of amenity
 Lack of Fidelity/Altruism
 Dislocation of families
Family
 Isolation from services
 Embeddedness of need
 Antagonism to desperation
 Increase of transience

8.
What does it mean?
 Individuals and Families can become entrapped in
their need
 Their need may go un-noticed or tolerated by the
community
 The community excludes non-operant families and in
doing so displaces them
 Families may be broken free of connection and drift,
Communities decline.

9.
Ecomapping
 Sometimes referred to culturographs
 Often used to identify opportunities for
social engagement, but also can be used to
identify service enmeshment.
 Utilise similar symbols to genograms
 Can use coloured and distorted lines to
highlight relationships in the network.
Retrieved from: https://www.smartdraw.com/ecomap/img/ecomap.jpg?bn=1510011096

10.
Examples
Retrieved from: http://www.genogramanalytics.com/images/ecomaps/ecomap_ex.jpg
Family
Community
Health
Centrelink
Police
Child Protection
Agency
Manager
CW
CHN

11.
Summary
 The idea of community is that it is a motivation
to support others and to be supported –
reciprocity
 The level of engagement in our community
enables our sense of security and belonging
and interest in others
 Structured environments like child care centres,
schools facilitate that outward engagement but
also inward participation.