The topic ‘help-seeking’ is of international interest. However, there is only a
very limited literature concerning help-seeking in child welfare and a distinct
dearth of studies that have examined the social organisation of parents’
decisions to seek help. Recent developments in child welfare services in England
and Wales have seen the introduction of a raft of initiatives that aim to
deliver parenting support to a broader range of parents; however, these
initiatives are not well grounded in an evidence base concerning parental
help-seeking. Focusing on the organisation of talk-in-interaction in interviews
and focus groups, this study examined parents’ normative and inter-subjective
understandings about help-seeking. The study found that when considering the
welfare 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 the
category ‘family’ for this kind of support. Outside (professional) help was very
much a residual option, only to be considered on the basis of ‘no-one to turn
to’. The findings are discussed in relation to national strategies that seek to
normalise support for parenting and issues of international relevance to do with
professional identification and diagnosis of need.
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