Crossing the Threshold

Parents with young children often have concerns about some aspect of their parenting or about a feature of their child’s behaviour, and may seek support from family or local support services about this. Bangladeshi parents with young children living in the borough of Tower Hamlets, East London, were considered a vulnerable group that did not readily take up health services, such as services for under 5’s. This began to change with the advent of Sure Start and locally based Children’s Centres. As a result of clinical work in one Centre, the author was keen to explore what kinds of concerns might lead Bangladeshi parents to seek help and to whom or where they turned for such help. A purposive sample of Bangladeshi parents, mostly mothers, took part in one or more focus groups and unstructured interviews. The study took an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) approach, coupled with a psychoanalytic perspective, to illuminate and make sense of the respondents’ understanding of their lived experience, in relation to the phenomena in question. The use of Focus Groups in IPA research is a subject of current debate and some of the strengths and limitations of this approach are discussed. The study highlights the importance of allowing opportunities for parents from this community to have informal contexts to articulate the complexities of their lived experience, rather than simply their views. Children’s Centres are seen to play a key role in providing psychosocial support for parents, with particular significance for first time parents and immigrants. The author suggests that Children’s Centres function as an alternative ‘village’ for parents, especially mothers, who are trying to find ways of bringing together their experience of being raised in Bangladesh with their role as parents of a new generation in another country.