Dawn Smith.mp3
Dawn is Married to Tom, and is the mother of their three
children, Tonia, aged 3, Ryan, aged 9, and Briony, aged 13 years.
Younger than her husband by 5 years, 29 year old Dawn works for 2 days a week at a local petrol station. Other than work, she is actively involved in many things in her community, and is an enthusiastic member of the local branch of the SNP. As well as attending branch meetings, Dawn manages all of the social media for the local branch, and so is heavily involved in online campaigning and the raising of awareness of local issues through Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Dawn is also involved in fundraising for the SNP at a national level, and so spends occasional weekends away from home attending conferences and other events.
Dawn is very supportive of Tom, her husband, but worries about him as he has been out of work for 6 months. She has been encouraging him to apply for a college course, and to retrain as a care worker, but she feels that Tom, who, like herself, is quite dyslexic, is making excuses for not going ahead with the application.
Money is tight, but Dawn feels that, if they were to economise a bit, they could easily manage while he was at college. She feels that the longer term benefits would make the shorter term sacrifices worthwhile.
Dawn has a good relationship with her Health Visitor, Amanda, and has spoken about this with her, and Amanda is confident that there may be benefits to which they might be entitled should Tom go to college.
Amanda, though, is also aware that Dawn can be quite a ‘hard taskmaster’, and has been known to give Tom a hard time about what she sees as an inability to look after the children. She is currently working with Dawn on this, as she feels that this may have a really negative impact on Tom’s self confidence, and this may be part of why Tom is reluctant to sign up to the college course. Amanda suspects that Dawn’s behaviour may, in part, be due to her own upbringing, being raised in a very strict home where she was brought up to believe that ‘anything less than perfect wasn’t good enough’. Her father was a strict disciplinarian, and, during Dawn’s teenage years, she experienced depression and anxiety as a result of the pressure she was under to ‘be perfect.’ She has told Amanda that she is terrified of failure, and constantly feels that people are ‘judging’ her.
Amanda is also working with the family on meeting the needs of their younger daughter, Tonia, and has found that both Tom and Dawn are willing and able to engage fully with her, and has no concerns about their commitment to their children.
She does have concerns about Tom’s parents, Joe and Anna, and the stresses their behaviours and lifestyle choices place on the family, however she feels that, while Joe’s smoking around the children and being drunk quite often is far from ideal, this is just a situation that needs monitoring at this time.