Parents alone cannot give children everything they need for healthy development. The wider social context is crucial too; ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ (HGD:195). Systemic ideas about the individual in society such as Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory (HGD:  196) are a helpful way of thinking about this. At the microsystem level, the settings such as home, school, work and community which impact directly on family members, Gloria has so far been able to make sure her children’s developmental needs are met, though the emotional and financial cost to her has been high. Now we are seeing the system at the point where the mesosystem, the relationship between the different microsystems, is threatened by a change in the exosystem, where others, like Gloria’s landlord in this case, take actions and make decisions in which the individuals in the microsystem are not involved, but which have a significant effect on their lives. The way the situation is unfolding for Gloria and her family is determined by the macrosystem, the social, cultural and economic context which frames public policy and attitudes. Max begins his narrative of Gloria’s problems here with observations about how this macrosystem has changed over the past 30 years.

Rapid social change is a feature of contemporary life, and it creates a gap of understanding between generations (HGD:  208), as does the experience of migration. When one generation’s experience of the world is so different from another’s, so is what they think of as the realities of life, which are in fact a social construction (HGD: 197), constantly in the process of change. The realities of Gloria’s life are very different from those of her mother, born and brought up in Jamaica. Compare also the contrasts between the worlds of the three generations of Maryam Begum’s family, and the differences Mary Carpenter experiences between the community she grew up in and the way the same community is now, even without the added disjunction of migration.

A significant aspect of Gloria’s social world, and a part of the macrosystem that is beyond her control, is racism. She is right to be concerned about the effect of ethnicity on her children’s life chances (HGD:  205). Max recognises this too when he observes that black boys are more likely to get into trouble with the police than their white counterparts, though he also shows that he himself is not immune to the assumptions that underlie institutional racism (HGD: 206). As is often the case, he has a general stereotype of black lads as troublemakers, but he once he gets to know a particular black lad – Gary – he has no difficulty in differentiating him from this stereotype and seeing him, and warming to him, as an individual. But it is only the accidental circumstance of Gloria’s house needing building work that has brought Max and Gloria’s very different social and cultural worlds into contact with each other and pushed Max’s view of Gloria and her family beyond the stereotype.

Max has perhaps been drawn into a closer involvement with Gloria and her family because he has unconsciously seen an opportunity to take something like a father role in relation to Gary. Roles, particularly parental roles, are an important part of our identity (HGD: 199-200), and we know from Max’s wife Penny that Max is struggling to find a way of playing this role in his own family. He has not been able to move, as Penny has, beyond the stereotyped view of his son’s learning disability, as he shows by the language he uses, rather apologetically, here (‘…If he’d been … well, normal’).

Gary, for his part, is responding enthusiastically to Max’s interest. He doesn’t have a strong male role model in his own family, though Gloria has made sure he has opportunities to find these models through his activities like scouts and karate. Here he’s using Max as a role model, wanting to find out about what Max did when he was his age, in relation to his own interests, and also checking out whether Max has experience of an activity, rock climbing, which is new to him and which he may be anxious about. Learning theory, specifically social learning theory (HGD: 101) tells us about the importance of role models in human development, especially in relation to gender roles (HGD: 102).

The view you take of Gloria’s children’s chances of developing into well-adjusted and fulfilled adults will depend on whether you think the positive influence of Gloria’s parenting is enough to outweigh the negative influence of poverty, housing insecurity and racism. As we point out in Chapter 1, where we discuss nature and nurture, the ‘nurture’ environmental factors that affect a child’s development include not only the immediate influence of parents and close family but also the effects of life events, and of social and cultural factors in the wider community (HGD: 11). Gloria already feels Gary is at some risk of being drawn into a criminal career like his father, so she acted to maximise his chances of healthy development by moving to a different area, changing the environment which was influencing him negatively. Gary is clearly an intelligent young man with a lot of potential. If the family become homeless now, or even just move again, he risks losing the networks he is building up through school and leisure activities which are positively influencing his development, and this will make it much harder for him to achieve his potential. The extent to which he is able to overcome this will depend on the choices and decisions he makes (HGD: 15), which in turn will depend on his resilience (HGD: 17; 128).

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