Working with parents in children’s social care

[Introduction] 

This is a Research in Practice podcast supporting evidence-informed practice with children and families, young people and adults. 

Susan: Hello and welcome everybody to the Research in Practice Podcast. I'm Susan, a Research and Development Officer at Research in Practice. In this two-part podcast series we'll be talking about child and family social care practice, specifically the practice of working with parents. I feel lucky to be in conversation with Donald Forrester and Richard Devine. To put today's conversation in context we're focusing on child protection, but actually many of the messages will also resonate with practitioners who are working with families in other roles and areas of children's social care.

You can expect to hear how Donald and Richard make sense of the evidence in this area, including their research knowledge, practitioner wisdom, in addition to what parents and other family members tell us or communicate with us about what it is like to have social care practitioners involved in their family life. In the first podcast we'll be discussing the context of social work with parents and power and really picking apart the dilemmas and tensions of child and family social work.

We'll also talk about the emotional landscape of practice for all parties, i.e. practitioners and family members, particularly surrounding difficult conversations. In part two we will explore what the term resistance means and discuss how understanding it is useful for practice. We'll also reflect on skills and approaches. And then finally in amongst all of that we'll be thinking about how we can also keep sight of the child or young person. So, stay tuned and thank you for listening.  

Both parts I think will be fascinating. So, welcome and thank you for being here with Donald and Rich. Let's introduce ourselves. If I start. I'm a social worker and I work at Research in Practice now. I was a social worker in a children and care team. I enjoyed lots of aspects of that role, particularly supporting children as their identity developed and supporting their sense of self efficacy and belonging. But I also found other core aspects of the task very challenging, which really relate to the context of social work which we'll be discussing today, support work was a lot more comfortable to me. Donald, would you like to introduce yourself? 

Donald: Yes, so, I qualified as a social worker 32 years ago. I know it's hard to believe looking at me, and I worked in London as a social worker doing, sort of, well, I suppose pretty difficult child protection stuff through until 1999 when I moved to become an academic, and since then I've been studying various things about social work, but I think a persistent interest, both when I was a practitioner and certainly as a researcher, is how social workers should talk with parents, what difference it makes and how we can create organisations that support good practice. So, I suppose whilst it was very difficult I, kind of, really liked the challenge of some of that potentially confrontational difficult work. I certainly found it interesting, and I think at the time even now we haven't really, sort of, theorised enough about what causes the conflict or how we could work with it, and a lot of my work is trying to make a contribution about that. So, that's a bit about me. Probably too much. Rich.  

Richard: Yes, thank you, and just because Donald didn't mention it, I will. He does have a book called The Enlightened Social Worker, which would be a fantastic read in addition to listening to this podcast, because I think it covers a lot of the difficult, kind of, challenges that we're going to try and talk about today. So, I qualified back in 2010 and I've spent several years working in long term child protection teams, and then in the middle of doing a masters in attachment studies I transitioned into a parenting assessment role where I undertake parenting assessments of children and families subject to pre and care proceedings, and that's a role that I still do. And in addition to that I have a blog that I try to write and I had a podcast for a period of time, and I've got a book coming out called Messy Social Work, Lessons From The Frontline, trying to talk about some of the dilemmas and difficulties and challenges that we experience as frontline social workers that we'll be covering today as well, because I agree with Donald in the sense that there's not loads of theorising about how do we collaborate and build relationships with parents that don't necessarily want us to be in their life? There's often a, kind of, pre-supposition that we're working with people who are, A, are willing to work with us and, B, willing to change, and often we don't have the privilege of either of those. So, yes, I'm looking forward to today. 

[The specific challenges of child and family social work with parents] 

Susan: Yes. Thank you. Thank you both for those introductions and I think the reason why we wanted to bring you both together, not that it's the first time that you've worked together, is because there is this, kind of, synergy that I've noticed between both of your work. And, Rich, before today actually said that through different routes you've come to some similar destinations in your thinking. Not least thinking about the reality of practice and how we can become more confident in some of the uncomfortable hard parts like you've both acknowledged, but also having very principled visions of social work practice, hostility and even hate. So, when we're really talking about the context of social work with parents and other family members, what is it that we need to think about as practitioners? What is it about this particular practice that is challenging and hard?  

[Key challenges and tensions] 

Richard: I'll jump in. I think for me one of the key challenges, I guess, is that social work is inherently conflict ridden. Now, that's been my experience of doing child protection for a long time, but I've only recently developed the language around that experience through the work of Donald. And the main reason why social work is inherently conflict ridden, or, one of the main reasons, is that we're, kind of, working with parents who don't necessarily want to work with us. And, so, in children's services as, kind of, professionals, we get to say when the relationship begins and when the relationship ends. And often the parents don't have that much confidence that we can be of benefit to them.

And, so, if my job was to help a family who wanted and needed the help, then it would be relatively straight forward. Instead, my job is often to decide, you know, whether a parent needed support and whether it was necessary to impose that support against their will in pursuit of safeguarding the child. And, so, when I had to decide essentially to curtail a parent's freedom and liberty, my role was often about managing some of the complicated dynamics that came as a result of that. So, for example, if I needed to go and visit a child, a child on a child protection plan, his mum might say that he didn't want to, she didn't want me to see him and that he was scared of meeting new people. And, so, there's a tension there that I have to overcome. When I have to go and visit a parent who is suspected of using drugs and talk about the effect that it's having on the unborn baby, the parent would adamantly deny that there was any drug use, even though there was quite a lot of evidence to support that there was.  

When I had to write a conference report to say, you know, the home conditions were unhygienic or unsafe, a parent might be affronted, really upset and disappointed and vehemently disagree. And, so, in those kind of examples, what parents have often responded to is a, kind of, power imbalance essentially and a sense of injustice where from their perspective they were having their right to a private family life taken away. And it took me a long time to realise this when I was a newly qualified social worker, a lot of parents' dissatisfaction expressed towards me was because I represented a statutory organisation. They didn't want me involved. Not necessarily because of who I am, and that's the risk that I think is there for newly qualifieds, is they take parents' dissatisfaction and unhappiness personally. Which, of course, sometimes you have to do because there are ways that we can communicate more favourably, but often it's because of who I represented.

And there were a couple of reasons why they might, you know, fall out with a representative of a statutory organisation. First, there's often a disagreement about the legitimacy of the concerns, but also a lot of parents feared social work involvement because they assumed that we could quite easily and readily remove their children. And there's not-, you know, it's hard to imagine that many people would want to work with a system where that could be the outcome, even if it meant that you would get access to some really useful support.  

I think Lady Hale, kind of, captured this really nicely when she did a talk of, like, the 30-year anniversary of The Children Act. She was one of the judges that developed The Children Act, and she wrote about the aspiration of the partnership between children, families and social workers, proved quite difficult to achieve under a voluntary basis, under a child in need basis, for example, because if efforts to work with the family run into difficulties, the local authority can always resort to care proceedings, and the families know that. So, I think a, kind of, central task, really, in social work is learning to manage this kind of conflict, which recognises us to understand the power that's bestowed upon us as statutory agencies.

I'll say one final thing and then I'll hand over to Donald. There's a, kind of, paradox as a practitioner in the sense that when you first start, you feel complete powerlessness. Like you feel inadequate and unsure of yourself and, so, it's very difficult for you to conceive or believe that the parent that you've spent time to prepare to go and see and you're trying to deal with your own anxieties and feelings around that, is also going to be feeling very anxious and insecure about the power that you might have. And, so, part of your development, I suppose, is trying to reconcile your sense of powerlessness with the parents' sense of you being all-powerful. 

Susan: [agrees] 

Donald: Yes, I mean, I completely agree with everything Richard has said. I think I've been rather obsessed with the gap between what I thought of as the rhetoric of children's social care and the reality in that whenever you read policy documents or the recent outcomes framework which outlines the purpose of children's social care, it's really positive. I mean, it's so positive and the outcomes there are so positive that you would really imagine every family would love to have a referral to children's social care. And yet, as Richard has outlined, the exact opposite is the case. It is very rare for somebody to be wanting a social worker. And I think there's also a gap, or, certainly has been a gap between how in social work we theorise the practice and the realities of practice because a lot of the theories of practice and how we work with people are essentially taken from counselling.

Counselling is a difficult setting in itself and actually lots of resistance can be encountered in a counselling situation, but it's a lot easier in a child protection situation because there you have the wider context that the person maybe doesn't want help, they think they haven't got a problem. Even if they think they have got a problem, as Richard was saying, why on earth would they tell you? Why would they be honest about what's going on with someone where you've got power, confidentiality is the opposite of guaranteed. It's guaranteed that if something serious comes up it will be shared, and they often don't know you very well. 

So, I mean, there's so much going on there and I think certainly in my social work course which was 30 years ago, so, hopefully things have changed for the better, we got taught, sort of, some listening skills, a little bit, not an awful lot, and listening skills are really important, but you need more than listening skills. If you just go in and listen to people, you're not doing the job. So, I suppose that the thing I constantly wrestle with is how can we understand what's causing that gap? How can we conceptualise why that gap is happening in a way that allows us on the one hand to still have a vision of what social work is about, that it's positive, and on the other hand helps us develop practices that may be useful for people trying to do this incredibly difficult and I think incredibly important job? So, yes, I think that to come back to the quote that kicked of both me and Richard going, because this is a topic we've spent a long time thinking about, it's that gap and how to bridge it I think is at the heart of, or, needs to be at the heart of these discussions. 

Susan: Yes, and I think as you were talking there about the reality of how many people don't want social work involvement, and as Rich was talking about that fear of imposition and control, you know, i.e. making decisions about how your family is run and the fear of that, it made me think about how the fear of that sharp end of social work, child protection, can actually really cascade across interactions with so many professions. Like think about a health visitor visiting a family for example. A parent's relationship with them might be affected by fear of what they might do if they see something they're worried about. So, you know, you hear about some people putting masks up, trying not to show their struggle, doing extra special cleans before a health visitor visits for example. 

[Difficult conversations] 

Donald: Absolutely, so, kind of, all pervasive in current culture I think, and many professionals struggle with these issues of how to have difficult conversations and some duck it. And certainly for me there was a specific point where I feel I became a social worker and it wasn't when I qualified, it was in my second year on a placement where I'd been working with a family where there were neglect and domestic abuse issues, and they had a child who was a girl who was seven or eight. And, I mean, she was always incredibly friendly, probably over-friendly, always came and sat on my lap.

Always smelt of wee. I would go back and tell my practice educator and she would say, 'You've got to tell the parents because you're writing this down on the case notes. So, they have a right to know that you have smelt this and have noted this.' So, you know, I screwed my courage to the sticking paste, went back. Couldn't do it. Couldn't say those words, because-, and this, kind of, really takes us to the crux of things, human interaction is designed so we don't upset each other, and so much of what we do is to try to enable the smooth, kind of, interaction between human beings without upsetting each other. Saying to someone words to the effect of, 'I think your child smells of urine. What's going on?' Which is obviously not how you would say it, but that message is against everything that you're taught to do to have polite conversations. You wouldn't say it to your friend if you could possibly avoid it, or, you know, family members, etc, even, and they're people you know and love, so, how much more difficult to go into a stranger and then exactly as Rich was saying, and where you have power, where they could be worried about their child being removed, etc. 

So, I think that's the crux of it, and there are multiple things that we need to be thinking about. One is about the emotions that are involved. So, it was emotionally very difficult to say it, and then I didn't say it. I had a very good practice educator, she set up the next meeting with a more experienced social worker going with me. I did say it and the father got up and went towards me in the room as if he was going to attack me, and the other social worker had to get up out of their armchair and, sort of, interpose. And, you know, I suspect I didn't say it very well. I suspect I said it in a very, kind of, confrontative manner, but I feel that was the point at which I became a social worker, because up until then I'd simply been trying to help people by being nice and caring and listening and doing lots of social support, and there I was able to do something more which was recognise I was there for the child and start the big process of having a difficult conversation. But just to, sort of, finish of the anecdote, so, I think that is the point at which I, sort of, crossed the threshold to start to become a social worker.

I went home, shared a house with several other flatmates at the time. My practice teacher and the social worker who went on the visit said, 'Are you okay? Is everything okay?' I said, 'Yes, yes, fine. Everything is fine. I'm fine.' I went home. One of my flatmates had some query about a bill, a shared bill, and they said they weren't going to pay it, and I was frying up some onions and I just went bang on the oven and said, 'What do you mean you're not paying the bill?' 

[Emotional impact] 

Which is, you know, not something I have ever done before or ever did again, but what I had done is not dealt with the emotional impact of that, A, the stress of having to say this difficult thing and, B, the fact that a man, quite a violent man, he didn't touch me but he had certainly threatened me quite seriously and after that it was a very difficult conversation. So, there was the, kind of, having the courage to have these difficult conversations and then there's the emotional labour involved afterwards of looking after yourself, particularly-, I mean, my practice supervisor was good, but I don't think enough of our organisations are supportive emotionally for this incredibly difficult emotional work. I literally cannot think of any other job in the world that is more emotionally difficult than talking to people about protection issues. It's fraught with resistance, difficulty, potential tensions and conflicts and you're often talking about, you know, children being abused, sexual abuse, emotionally terribly difficult things, and if you do form a relationship with the parent then they will be telling you things that are difficult to hear. So, I think it's one of the most difficult jobs in the world. It's one of the most important and when done well it can make such a difference, but it's emotionally very, very difficult. 

Richard: Yes, I completely agree with the emotional and psychological and relational challenges that you experience as a social worker, and I still think that's probably an aspect of, I don't know, theorising that we haven't done enough. And it reminded me actually when you were talking, Donald, I went to do a visit with a much more senior social worker when I was relatively newly qualified and this dad had quite a, kind of, hostile disposition, ready, didn't want us involved. He was very angry. Clearly quite troubled and I asked him a question about the allegation that had been made with respect to his son being out and about late in the community. He was a single dad, his wife had died, and he got really angry at me and I was, like, panicked and I was thinking, 'Oh, what did I learn in my course about dealing with anger?' And it was, like, oh, yes, say something like, 'Oh, I'd appreciate it if you don't speak to me like that.' So, this really angry dad.

Donald: How did that go?  

Richard: I said, 'Oh, I'd really appreciate it if you didn't speak to me like that.' And he lost it, and it just completely derailed the visit. And I got back to the office slightly bruised and wounded and I said to the really experienced social worker across from me, I said, 'Oh, do you think I shouldn't have said that?' And she just nodded her head. 

Donald: Experience is a great teacher isn't it? 

Richard: So, you learn what not to say and and what you can say. In some ways it's, like, technically right, you can say, 'Have some respect. Please speak to me nicely.' But on another level it's, kind of, like what's going to most aggravate the situation, or, how can you interact in a way that makes it as least conflictual as possible without abdicating your responsibilities as a practitioner? 

Donald: Yes.

Richard: That's the real key challenge, is not-, you know, upholding your responsibilities to the child but also trying to generate compassion towards the parent who might be behaving in a way that's causing harm to themselves or even their children, and treat them with dignity and respect. 

Donald: Yes. I mean, as I've been told more than once, if you're frightened of a parent, what's it like for the children in that family? There's a fair chance that they are far more frightened than you can even imagine. Not necessarily, but quite possibly. Also on the, sort of, subject of the emotional side of things. I was very struck in a study I did. In fact it was the randomised control trial we did of motivational interviewing where I was providing consultations for social workers after training, and I thought it would all be about specific skills. I know we're going to get onto specific skills later, you know, should I have used a reflection instead of a closed question at this point?'

And just for a month it was not about skills with any of them. It was about emotions, that they would-, they came in and, you know, I'd say, 'Let's talk about a family.' And very quickly because I wasn't a line manager, because subject to extreme circumstances it was completely confidential, they would tell me things like, 'I am really scared of this dad and I feel I can't tell my line manager.' Or, 'I really love this mum because she's a trier and I really feel even though she's had a difficult-,' Or, 'These kids really appeal to me.' Or all sorts of-, or, 'I'm scared.' Was a big one. A big one was, 'I am scared of this family and I don't feel I can say to my line manager that I am afraid because I will feel unprofessional or inexperienced, or all this. So, I mean, there's a sense in which it's important for us to talk about these skills of working within social work, but you can't deploy skills as if they're just technical fixes.

[Organisational support for emotional work] 

They're not like the skills of someone playing football or netball or playing the piano, that they have been in an emotionally charged context and we need to have certainly emotionally intelligent and resilient workers, but it can't just be about the individuals. It has to be about organisations, teams, leadership, that supports people to do this emotional work, because raising difficult issues, having difficult conversations is not just about, you know, using certain tricks. So, Rich, you make the point that you said, 'Could you please be less aggressive?' Maybe not the right thing to say, but it may be that whatever you said that person was going to kick off because of the situation, because you had to say some difficult things to them. So, we need to be providing the emotional support for this emotional labour, I guess, and that's one of the biggest gaps we have in contemporary social work I think. 

Richard: And there's a really nice study by Harry Ferguson on direct work with children that, kind of, supports that, where he did some ethnographic research, basically spending time with social workers who were going out and seeing children. And in this study what he found was that a social worker could go into one family, interact really beautifully with the child, elicit their wishes and feelings, understand the child's lived experience. And then that same social worker with all of those skills and abilities could go into another family where it was a lot more difficult, there was a degree of, like, hostilities, they felt scared and frightened, and they could completely almost lose sight of the child because they were contending with all of their own feelings and emotions with this situation. And, so, that points to, you know, the role of supervision and the culture of an organisation in terms of it's not just about the individual worker's ability, it's the specific context which they have to go into and then the support that they have in order to do their role effectively. 

Donald: Absolutely and, I mean, Harry's work is brilliant on the emotional content of the work and the realities of fear and anxiety and things that are going wrong for social workers. I've observed that as well, that with parents you can have a social worker who just seems to be-, you know, is doing wonderful work with one family and then with the next one it's all conflict and difficulty, and they speak to them in a very different way, partly because the parents speak to them in a different way. It's a very complicated context. 

[Developing your own set of practice principles]

Richard: I'll just say one more thing on this. It makes me think about as social workers one of the things that I think is important is to develop, like, personal ethics. Like there's a lot of talk about ethics, like BASW will have ethics as will the International Association of Social Work, but to me they're quite hard to resonate with or to connect with as a social worker. And, so, I do think it's, like, what-, for me a central ethical principal is to-, what made me think about this, sorry, is to ask ourselves, 'What type of social worker do I want to be?' And then developing some kind of principles that uphold irrespective of the kind of conditions that you're in. So, what type of social worker would you want knocking on your door if you were traumatised, exhausted, struggling with an addiction or in a violent relationship? How would you like a social worker to treat you if you reacted with fear or anger or resistance?

And I think social work has the potential to be very character building because you're expected to uphold these principles. That's why I think it's important to self-identify them so that they mean something to you around humility, compassion, empathy, so that you can, kind of, treat parents with respect and dignity irrespective of how they treat you, whilst also recognising that you're not a robot and that you need to think about how those emotions will affect you. Because, by the way, if you don't take into consideration your feelings, it runs the risk of them being projected out onto the relationship with the parents in negative ways. 

So, you know, for example, Donald hitting his frying pan on the cooker in response to his house mate could subconsciously get played out in the relationship with a parent in a way that would create some unhealthy dynamics. 

[Managing difficult team cultures and expectations of the role]

Susan: That makes so much sense, the need for practitioners to create their own personal set of values and principles that grounds or anchors their practice irrespective of the context. You were talking about it in terms of the contexts of different families, but perhaps-, well, it was making me think about how important it might be to create those principles to protect against difficult or strained team cultures, or, difficult organisational multi agency situations people might find themselves in. I've heard some professionals talk about the impact of a slightly more depleted team culture, or, where ‘us versus them’ language tends to be used. But being part of that can result in feelings of shame and obviously not optimal practice. What are your thoughts on how you might uphold your values when the organisational culture is not so supportive?  

Richard: Well, there are a couple of points about values or upholding values when you're not necessarily always supported to be able to uphold them in the way that you'd like, but one of the ways is in terms of the culture and the system which is very proceduralised and overly bureaucratic. It makes it very challenging to have the relational space in order to think creatively about how we go about working with families. And I don't know if this was, you know, the right thing to do, but my way of handling that was to accept the system for what it was in some ways. I didn't choose the system, nor did I design it, you know, I didn't have much influence over it.

All I could control was the type of social worker that I could be within that system, and so that's what I focused on. And I realise that might sound fatalistic, but I just found focusing on the issues from which I had no influence or control over depleted my energy. We've had a lot of addiction issues in my family, and so I've been to a lot of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, and one of the sayings that I learnt from there is the serenity prayer which is, 'God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.' And, so, for me it's, like, how can I be the type of social worker I want to be despite the, kind of, working conditions? And then there is an element where the system is what you make it. Like how you show up in your role, you know, if you can be compassionate and empathetic and in the way in which you work with parents you tilt the system into a more favourable one. 

And then there's another way of thinking about the way in which your values clash because there's a sense when you-, I hear a lot of social workers and I had this experience too, that the job isn't really what you anticipate that it's going to be when you go into it, and I think part of that is because we've been mis-sold what social work is and what it will be. And, so, then there's an expectation gap when social workers go into the role and they realise, 'Oh, I'm not going to be of therapeutic value and of support to a parent in the way that I'd initially anticipated and imagined and had been taught in university.

In fact, I'm going to have to have some very difficult conversations with parents about what they need to change and what will happen if they don't change. And my role is probably going to be more of a coordinator because my time that I have to spend with families is fairly limited.' And there's a lot of talk about relationship-based practice in social work and for the most part I'm, kind of, in favour of that, but there is a reality where the amount of time that we have with parents is incredibly limited. So, for example, if you have a child who's on a child protection plan, you have to visit them every fortnight, and then that visit might be, I don't know, 30 minutes. At a maximum it will be an hour, and that's the amount of time the social worker has to influence someone's thinking, their way of dealing with feelings, the patterns of behaviour, addiction issues and their relationships. 

So, you know, if you say 20 minutes a fortnight is 40 minutes a month, and I've done the maths on this, it's like eight hours a year, eight hours out of the total of 8,760. So, in percentage terms it's like 0.1%. So, that's the amount of time, you know, and, so, 99.9% of the time a parent is influenced by their other relationships and circumstances and factors. I mean, you could double, triple or even quadruple the amount of time that a social worker spends with a family based on what it currently is, and it still-, the effect is going to be very small. But that doesn't necessarily mean that our role isn't really fundamentally very important. It's just about having realistic expectations about what we can and are there to achieve. And this is why I think Donald's work is so important because he talked about the gap between practice and reality, and much of his work, especially his new book, is helping us think about what is the role of social work fundamentally and how can we ground it in a reality and then organise practice based on that reality? 

[Rights-based practice] 

Donald: Yes, well, I'm glad that you've set me up to talk about that because, yes, as I said before, I've struggled with this gap constantly. I think social workers, you know, do make a huge difference and I can think of some families where I made a huge difference, but it's in a small proportion of the families we work with. If it's 5% of the families, we have to be thinking about what about the other 95%? And my thinking about this from various sources, one was thinking about the relationship-, well, not just thinking, researching the relationship between practice skills and outcomes and finding it wasn't particularly strong, largely for the reasons Richard has just outlined.

You know, a very skilled social worker compared to an unskilled social worker on the one hand, and on the other hand, poverty, experiences of abuse, current relationships, racism, sexism, all the other stuff, yes, let's be realistic about the difference we can make through the way we are with people. But more broadly, I suppose, I've been thinking, we focus too much on, sort of, rather general ideas of helping and social justice, I guess, and not enough on what actually difference social workers might be making. And I feel that we need children's social care and child and family social work because in any rights-based society, and thank goodness we have a rights-based society where we take seriously individual rights, but mostly we let people get on with exercising their rights. But there are some groups that can't do that, and one of the big groups, the biggest group that can't do that is children, which is why we need people to protect their rights.  

And the most obvious right is that if we believe individuals should be able to do what they want to do, then to a large degree parents should be allowed to parent, sort of, as much as they want up to a limit, and that limit is created by what's not good enough for their kids, and it's that-, that's a core tension in children's social care, but there are actually a number of others. So, for instance, we also think the views of children are really important but we can't always act on them. So, they have a right to be heard, they have a right for their capacity to be judged, then we need to make a decision about what's in their best interests, and sometimes we should act on what they want, even if we think it's not in their best interests. But often we will have to act in their best interests even if it's not what they want. So, I just think there are loads and loads and loads of tensions created by these rights that we need if we want a liberal humane worthwhile society. And what we need therefore is professionals who can work with these types of issues, these types of tensions. And there are a number of things that flow from that. One is the tensions and conflicts are not accidental and they're not because you or anyone else is doing a bad job. They are baked in. They are the reason we need children's social care. You know, if we didn't have these tensions and conflicts then you just wouldn't need this whole service. You'd have families receiving help, getting it and everyone's happy. This is much more complicated stuff.  

Secondly, you judge its worth not by the outcomes it produces, but by the quality of the process, which I think ties into the point Richard is making here is that we can't in a simple way show that if we do A, we get X outcome, or, more likely to get X outcome if X is a positive outcome. So, it's not that what we're doing is producing positive outcomes necessarily, but if someone knocked on your door and you've got kids and they were doing a child protection investigation, I think you need to be thinking what sort of social work should I have a right to expect, and therefore trying to provide it for others because in doing that we're creating a respectful humane society.

And, so, I think social work is absolutely essential and children's services are absolutely essential for a good society, but not for the reasons that I used to think which is that it helps people who are in a bit of trouble. We sometimes do that. But it's more that we're working with these conflicts and difficulties and need to take seriously the ethical dilemmas, the practical dilemmas, the emotional and-, yes, charge of all that work. So, it's a different way of thinking about what could be a gap between the rhetoric and the reality, and trying to develop a vision of social work that is I hope aspirational and shows that it's worthwhile, but simultaneously recognises the really difficult nature of the practice that people experience every single day is part of the reason we need the job and therefore we need to think very carefully how to do that difficult practice. 

[Tensions and conflicts] 

Richard: And I think that's really important because what happens otherwise is you go into social work, the relationships are fraught with these tensions and these conflicts that you, kind of, don't feel prepared or ready for, and then you feel personally responsible for generating all of these difficult relationships. And actually, as Donald pointed out, it's, kind of, baked into the nature of the work. And, so, once you recognise that, it's a little bit liberating in the sense that you know that this is going to be a feature of your practice, and then you can also think about what are some of the ideas or the principles and the skills that I need in order to manage these kind of difficult issues and tensions and conflicts that I'm going to be dealing with on a day to day basis. 

[Authoratitive practice] 

Donald: So, I think I completely agree, the tensions and conflicts are built in, but I don't think people should take from what we're saying that therefore you shouldn't worry about upsetting parents for instance. In the '90s when I practised I think there were quite a few social workers I worked with who used the mantra of being child-focused to be really quite abusive to parents I think. You know, they would say they were telling it like it was, but they would do so in a way that I think was disrespectful to the parent. So, I think realising that you start from a position of potential conflict, and then thinking how can we make this as constructive and respectful a conversation as possible, whilst being authoritative as a social worker? So, authoritative is not being authoritarian. It's not mis-using our power, but it's recognising we have power and using it responsibly and ethically. So, what does that look like? What does authoritative social work look like and how can it allow us to reduce but not get rid of the conflict and tension that is part of social work practice? So, for instance, whenever you do have a disagreement with parents after-, well, during and then after, it's only worth reflecting on could you have handled it differently? It may have been a difficult conversation thinking about it or reflecting on it in supervision, are there different ways I could have approached it? I think that's always an important thing to think about.

[Outro]

Thanks for listening to this Research in Practice podcast. We hope you've enjoyed it. Why not share with your colleagues and let us know your thoughts on X (formerly Twitter) @researchIP and LinkedIn.

[Introduction] 

This is a Research in Practice podcast, supporting evidence informed practice with children and families, young people and adults.  

Susan: Welcome to part two of this Research in Practice podcast about the practice of working with parents and child and family social work. We are here with Donald Forrester and Richard Devine and I'm Susan. I am keen to get straight into part two. So, at the end of part one, Rich and Donald were explaining authoritative practice and the need to recognise the power we hold and using it responsibility and ethically. How authoritative practice can allow us to actually reduce but not get rid of the conflict and contention that is very much part of social work practice.

So, linking to that explanation of authoritative practice, Karen Broadhurst and colleagues, back in 2017, published a report analysing insights from birth mothers with experience of recurrent care proceedings and many women valued what the researchers summarised as ‘straight-talking with warmth’. So, being straightforward and honest was valuable and motivating but so was the emotional support offered by workers. So, it was both/ and, and at the same time. So, engagement is about dynamics between parties and is about relationships and Claire Mason, she also says, 'Who's role is it to engage anyway?' When you talked about authoritative practice, I wondered if you both could tell me a little bit more about how we can build engagement for parents and other family members. So, thinking about the reasons why issues commonly come up like the fear and the tensions, which we talked about in part one, would you be able to tell us a bit more about how we might address those? 

[Understanding and working with denial or minimisation] 

Richard Devine: Yes. So, for me, I think the issue around engagement and the reasons for not engaging are kind of intertwined, and how we respond to parents' unwillingness to engage can have a massive influence on their likelihood of engaging. So, for example, when I first qualified, if a parent that I worked with was being dishonest or minimising or whatever it was, I would find that really difficult and would want to point out, very clearly, why they were wrong. And then you just end up spending an inordinate amount of time in these disputes about the truth, essentially. And I found that once I realised some of the rationale or the reasons as to why a parent might be compelled to be dishonest or minimise the concerns, then I found it a lot easier to navigate that relationship. My thinking was influenced a lot by a book by Andrew Turnell and Susie Essex called Working with 'Denied' Child Abuse, and they talk about the many strong and social and interactional pressures that make denial a compelling response. And part of it was what we alluded to earlier where a lot of parents are highly fearful of social work intervention and they overestimate the powers that social workers have and believe that we can easily remove their children and then in other cases where the child is on a child protection plan or you're in pre-proceedings, the potential for care proceedings and that the loss of their child was a real possibility. So, in both instances, the families could easily conclude that sharing the concerns or requesting for help would be used unfavourably against them and that then results in disputes where parents will either deny or minimise and we try and prove them to be incorrect. 

And so, that is what I would call ‘situational denial’ and then there's another, type of, denial which I'd call ‘psychological denial’, which is I suppose the ways in which we protect ourselves from the more shameful aspects of our functioning or some of the behaviours that we don't have a lot of control or influence over. So, for example, you know, if we have a parent who uses alcohol a lot and that causes lots of difficulties in terms of bringing up their child, financial problems, getting up in the morning, taking them out and stimulation and all of those things, that might be causing them a lot of problems, but it also might be the only effective and available solution to cope with loneliness or the emotional distress related to some of their past experiences and the pain of recognising the fact that this alcohol use is effecting them and their children just might be too much to tolerate, so they just pretend that there's no issue. They just deny it. They just flat out, they don't have a problem, they rationalise it. There's a self-protective component to it. And so, part of how we navigate the relationship is we anticipate and recognise the incentives that parents have around being dishonest or minimising some of the concerns, not take it personally, like they're trying to personally deceive us necessarily and then try and generate compassion and empathy for why they might find it difficult to share and open up about some of their difficulties. And part of that also involves us then explaining some of the consequences or what some of the consequences might be. 

So, for example, I could have a conversation with a parent where we have quite strong evidence that they're drinking alcohol. They deny it and minimise it and then my conversation has to be something like, 'Look, I'm really worried about the effects of the alcohol use on you and on the children. I'm not saying you have to agree with me on this necessarily and I know you're saying that you don't drink very often, but I'm worried about this and I'm worried if things don't change, children social care will end up escalating their involvement, which might mean that we have to go onto a child protection plan or into pre-proceedings and we want to be able to avoid that if possible.' And also, empathise that a lot of parents I work with are very fearful about sharing that they have a problem because they're worried that it will immediately lead to an escalation, but you need to know we're in child in need at the moment, this is what would happen, this is what we would need to see if it was to go to child protection and explain that my experience is that parents feel better when they open up about their problems, even though there's a bit of a risk, because then they can get the support that they need. Now, if you don't want the support and you don't want to address the problem, that's also completely up to you but you just also need to know the consequences should you choose not to do that. And so, I suppose that's partly how you build engagement is recognising denial and minimisation is a reasonable response and then try and develop empathy around the reasons for that and explain the consequences. 

[Resistance and use of reflections] 

Donald Forrester: I agree with everything you've just said, Rich, but just to add something. One of the ways I've written about this is an ecological model of resistance. So, there's everything-, and I must read that book actually [referring to Working with ‘denied’ child abuse], I haven't read it. It sounds really, really useful. There's more microlevel things but there's also the organisational demands and expectations. It's even the higher-level things. So, I am a white male, middle-classed social worker. Most of the people I work with as well are working class, most of them are women, many may come from different backgrounds. That can also create differences, maybe a sense that I won't understand what's going on with them. So, there's all multiple levels which resistance can be expected, if you like, and I think Richard's done a really good job at describing the best we can do with this. So, I said, social worker courses tend to teach listening skills and listening skills are really, really, really important. You need to be able to listen to people. I particularly think a skill that social workers-, so, evidence shows, social workers use reflections very little, and I think reflections are really important as a skill because they do a specific thing in a conversation. Social workers tend to ask lots of questions and questions are important. A reflection is an attempt to show that you've understood what the other person says, and a lot of resistance is about, 'You don't understand me. You're not listening to me.' And trying to understand and more than understand, show that you're understanding can go a long way to reducing some of that resistance.  

[Denial and minimisation continued] 

So, I think reflections are a really important part of listening skills, but social work is not just about listening. It's about the things Richard's just been talking about raising difficult issues and one of the most difficult issues we might want to talk about is whether someone is lying to you or not, but that's just one example in many, many difficulties we might have. So, I think the term that Harry Ferguson coined for some of this difficulty was good authority. Well, my interpretation of what he's talking about is good authority and I think that's not just listening, but it's also being able to raise concerns or difficulties in a way that is on the one hand, clear because people want to know where they stand and a fundamental part of respectful social work is people knowing why you're involved, what you know that you're worried about, etc. but doing that in a way that enables a conversation. So, I think the way Rich was talking about it is really good that there's very little point in conversation about, 'You said X and it's definitely not true because I've got the medical records which show why.' It's probably not going to go very far, but you can say there is this difference, 'Let's have a conversation about that and where shall we go with this?

That you think...' So, Lucy Sheehan recently completed a really good PhD in observing social work practice, and one of the examples was social work with a couple who had just had a baby born and the couple said they hadn't known the woman was pregnant until the last minute, but the social worker and the midwife thought it was a concealed pregnancy because of previous child protection concerns and the court eventually made a ruling that it was a concealed pregnancy. But actually, was it particularly helpful to have that as the focus of so much of the work when there were more substantive issues that could be talked about? And you could agree to disagree about that. 

So, I suppose one of the things is how you raise concerns. So, we need A, really good listening skills, including reflections but B, we need to be able to raise difficult issues and even more than that, again, Rich mentioned this, explain consequences of different courses of action to people but C, try to do this in a way that creates a dialogue, so you're not just dumping on them because I think one of the things we quite often see when we observe practice is when a social worker's got something difficult to tell people, they sometimes talk all the time because it's quite difficult to have a conversation about difficult stuff. So, it may be easier to say, 'Look.' Talking to a woman who's experiencing domestic abuse, rather than having a conversation about whether she could protect the child and how you could help them, but you start saying, 'You got to do this, this, this, this, this, this because I don't think your child is safe from your partner.' And that's not a good way of practising because it's not respectful, I think. I don't know, what do you think, Rich? 

Richard Devine: Yes, I think listening and those reflections that you talked about is probably one of the most effective or powerful ways of reducing resistance. The challenge is to be able to demonstrate that you've listened, even if you don't necessarily agree. So, the parent might be complaining that you haven't done this, or this is their experience of the service, or they might be minimising or denying or making rationalisations and in the back of your head you're thinking, 'Well, yes, but I know that that wasn't how it happened because I've seen this information that contradicts.' And so, it's very easy to quickly get caught up into these disputes but there is a value in the first instance of listening and demonstrating that you have listened and that will often reduce a lot of defensiveness because people feel unheard and listening and showing that you've listened by reflection doesn't necessarily mean that you agree with them but it's a very powerful way of conveying that you've listened and truly understood. 

[Understanding resistance as a human response] 

Susan: I think you've offered some very practical ideas there which I think many of our listeners will be very interested in. I wondered if we could just take a tiny step back because you both have clearly read around and written about resistance, but I just wonder if it is worth us defining what we mean by resistance because I think sometimes language like resistant parents, challenging parents or difficult parents can be used as if they're fixed attributes of individuals or even as if being resistant is a form of harm or abuse in and of itself. This isn't obviously helpful or ethical and I just think resistance has sometimes been used in quite an ill-defined and inconsistent way which then means it is perceived with that pejorative sense. You are both describing resistance in a very different way to that as a very human expression, a process that we can all experience as humans. Could we take a moment to define what we mean when we're talking about resistance, please? 

Donald Forrester: So, I use it rather loosely to refer to any sort of perceived non-cooperation by a parent, which can be anything from-, probably anything short of physical assault, but certainly verbal, vigorous disagreement or being shouted at, through lying or denying or minimising, through to not answering questions or activities like that. But I don't see it as residing it within the person. I think that's the key thing. I see it as an interactive product of a conversation in a particular context. So, I don’t think it's very useful to talk about resistant parents. I think it's much more useful to talk about what you actually feel happened. So, when we raised this issue, Mr A shouted at the social worker and, as in one of the cases I worked with, they went into the bathroom and smashed it up with a baseball bat. I mean, that's factual. Reflecting on that, perhaps there are things I could have said differently, but it's not saying he was resistant. 

[Resistance and Motivational Interviewing]   

So, I use it to understand a broad set of terms. I also sometimes think of it as-, and this draws directly from Motivational Interviewing where the idea is most people are ambivalent about any behaviour they're not changing. So, you know, if you don't want to change your behaviour, you won't change. And if you really want to change your behaviour, you probably should change it. But most of it, most of the time, when we're working with people, they're ambivalent, they may see it as a problem but perhaps there are benefits for them as well, and resistance can often be just the side of the arguments for not changing. So, things like denial and minimisation are the flip side of ambivalence, I guess. So, it's not so much a tight definition as a general understanding of it as something that's produced in interaction rather than within parents, I guess. I don't know, Rich, what do you think? 

Richard Devine: Yes, I'd agree. I think resistance certainly from a Motivational Interviewing context, they would definitely situate resistance within the relationship and in some ways, I agree with that and in some ways I don't. In the way that I agree with it is that there's definitely things that you can do as a social worker that increases resistance and there's definitely things that you can do that decreases resistance and we've talked about some of them today and there's some quite proven techniques that are derived from Motivational Interviewing that allow you to decrease resistance. For example, reflections, demonstrating a level of empathy, those things.

And I think that idea of ambivalence also being a feature, a pretty typical feature of anybody wanting to change is really helpful to hold onto as well because if you go and speak to a parent, they can often give reasons for maintaining the behaviour and maybe some reasons for changing it and what we tend to do is get caught up in adding more reasons for them to change and then they get defensive about why they don't have to change. That's the automatic default response. Even if you yourself as a social worker, if you say, 'I want to change a habit that I have.' For example, you know, I stay on social media too late at night, and it affects this, that and the other. And if somebody goes, 'Yes, and it also has these other negative side effects.' You'd be like, 'Oh, hang on a minute, it's not that bad.' So, it automatically it puts people in a position of defending the behaviour which then has the effect of sustaining the very behaviour that you're attempting to achieve.    

And so, part of ambivalence is recognising that there's always going to be reasons for change and against the change and that's part and parcel of being on a journey and that you want to facilitate and support the reasons that they want to change and then bring out the best in them. One of the best examples, I think of like, resistance is in Motivational Interviewing and Donald would know this, in the training that he's developed is that there's an exercise and I've delivered this training a few times this year where you get everybody to stand up in a circle facing one another and you get them to close their eyes, these are social workers and family support workers, you get them to close their eyes and you say, 'Think about something that you feel really ashamed about. A big secret, that brings you a lot of shame and embarrassment.' And then you can feel the nervousness immediately in the room and then you say, 'Right, everybody, I want you to close your eyes because I'm going to walk around and I'm going to tap somebody on the shoulder in a minute and I'm going to ask you to share that thing that you feel very embarrassed or ashamed about.' And people hate it. They absolutely hate it and then you get them all to sit down, and they just relax completely, and they all say, 'If you'd tapped me on the shoulder, I would have lied. I would have made up something and I would've been dishonest or I would've taken a little bit of what I'd had and massively minimised it.' And that's what happens.

Donald: Or I would've told you to F off. 

Richard: Yes. 

Donald: Resistance, isn't it? 

[Conversations which maximise the chance of change] 

Richard: And so, that's what we sometimes expect of parents when we go and visit them is to reveal some of the things that they feel most ashamed and disappointed about themselves. I mean, resistance, there is an element as well like, there are some behaviours that parents will present with where you're not going to be able to facilitate them making change. This is why what Donald was saying earlier about the importance of like, how do we define our outcomes? And we should define them by the process rather than the outcome because the outcome might be that we've removed a child, which on the face of it might not necessarily be a good outcome, but it might also be the best outcome for that child and in those instances, how can we be assured that we've upheld an important part of a good society where we can say, 'We've given that parent absolutely every opportunity to change.'

And one of the ways that we go about that is facilitating or having conversations with them that maximised the chance of them being able to change and there are a few ways and techniques that have proven to be able to do that and they are around empathy, working with their ambivalence, rolling with their resistance. So, this isn't just a nice way of being, but it's also just the most effective way of being able to facilitate and maximise the chance that a parent will change if they want to. So, it's less about an outcome per se, in terms of this will definitely reduce resistance, well, this will remove the resistance because we can't control that. All we can control is how we show up, how we empathise with the parent, demonstrate compassion, explain the consequences of their actions and local authority involvement transparently and humanely and then that's as far as we can go really, I think. 

[Skills help us to achieve our values] 

Donald: Yes, and I think when we talk about skills, they're really a way to describe something that's deeper and more important, which I think is some sense that we need to give people that we really respect them and want the best for them. So, an example of this is I worked with an experienced manager, I was training her in Motivational Interviewing, and several members of her team had told me how great she was at direct work. And she particularly loved working with young drug-using parents and she said, 'I'm really struggling with MI [Motivational Interviewing] because this is not how I work at all.

What I do is I sit the parents down, I say, I know you're using drugs, you know you're using drugs, let's cut the crap, let's talk this through so that you can keep your child because that's what I want and that's what you want.' Now, there's no textbook that says that's the right way to talk to people and it would be very easy to do that in a way that was abusive, the thing I was talking about earlier, but what the parents tended to realise is that she really cares. She really cares about us, she enjoys working us, she wants to work with us, and she got very positive reactions. So, I think when we talk about skills, the skills are a way of us achieving our deeper values or expressing our deeper values. So, she would then listen to people, she didn't just talk to them all the time, but I think you can achieve this in multiple ways. If I talk about the importance of reflective statements, I've found those transformative because they change difficult conversations very often for me, but as a skill, it needs to be at the service of the values which are about, are they genuinely wanting the best for the people we're working with? I think people pick that up. They know the social workers who care, who will go the extra mile, who are really respectful, who want to hear their point of view, who don't just see them as a case to be processed. 

Susan: That's a really wonderful way of putting it, skills are a way of expressing our deeper values. 

Donald: Yes, that's what I think. 

Richard: Yes, I'd completely agree because when you're a newly qualified social worker, you might not necessarily have all of the skills but if the parent can trust your intention in terms of you genuinely wanting to understand how they've come to develop the difficulties they have in their life, you can usually-, they're usually very forgiving if you don't have all of the really good technical skills or knowledge about this service or that service. If you're willing to genuinely connect with them and understand the reasons for their difficulties, even when the behaviour seems illogical or self-destructive or harmful to others, if you can try and understand how does that behaviour serve them? What's the benefit that they feel that they identify from for example, taking heroin or being domestically violent or whatever it might be, and then yes, the skills can come secondary to that, I think.

Susan: Would you like to talk a bit more about skills and approaches which have been successful because you've been able to use them in a way which connects with your values? You've already shared a number of examples, but are there any others which come to mind?  

Donald: For me, I felt very stuck working with people. I felt like I was raising concerns and then conversations were going nowhere and indeed, in my first research study I found lots of other social workers felt the same, they were stuck and waiting for things to go wrong. That was with parents who had drug or alcohol problems, or the social worker felt they did. And I found motivation interviewing just a transformative way of thinking about this because it helped me understand the things we've been talking about that resistance is a normal reaction to the situation people are in. It provided skills for trying to minimise that resistance by engaging people, finding a focus for the work and particularly things like reflections. I mean, I could talk more about the micro skills, but I think even with MI, one of the things is all the skills are really about something they call the spirit of MI. Which is really about a profound respect for-, and this is a key change actually that I've made, which again, you asked about skills and it's not about skills.

I think towards the end of my time as a practicing social worker, I thought you could make people change. I don't know why I thought this, and I think the system thinks that, that you can make people change, but ultimately, it is up to parents or any individual whether they change and if you really believe that, then it changes the way you have conversations. So, I don't think it's just me because I've listened to a lot of recordings where so called smart plans are lists of things parents should do that have largely been devised by the professionals, but there's very little point doing that if you haven't engaged the parent in what they want to do and why they want to do it. 

[Respectful and collaborative practice]

So, if you take seriously the idea that it's up to parents what they do then A, in a counselling type situation or a helping type conversation, you get the skills of Motivational Interviewing. But in a more child protection situation, it also changes the nature of the conversation. It is not up to you as a social worker necessarily to make the parent do something. So, Rich raised an issue earlier in the conversation which is a common one that social workers deal with which is parent says you can't see the child for whatever reason, whatever context. I don't think it's about saying, 'Well, you've just got to do it.' I think the respectful thing to do is exploring what's going on there, explaining what your take on it is. If there's a difference, trying to see if you can resolve it.

There may come a point however, where you have to have a conversation where you say, 'So, from your point of view, A, B, C, these are the reasons. I think what you need to realise is I feel I absolutely have to see this child and therefore, what I will do is let's say it would be go away to get a legal order, you'd have a right to go-,' then you explain the consequences and then they've got a choice to make and this is about respectful practice with parents where you believe they have-, respect is about believing people have got choices to make, I think and so, they may have limited options but I think we need to be clear what their options are. And I suppose MI provided me with a set of techniques to serve that higher purpose of believing people are worthy of respect and have decision to make about their lives. Yes, I don't know, Rich, do you want to.

Richard: Yes, it sounds good. The only thing I'd add to that is one of the ideas that really helped me that I learned through Signs of Safety that-, actually, it's also pointed out in a book by James Barber called Beyond Casework where he has a chapter on working with parents who don't necessarily want to work with us. You kind of see where you have common ground between yourself and parents. So, for example, asking parents the question, like, 'What do you want to happen? Given that we're involved now, what would you want to happen?' And almost without fail, what parents will say is, 'We don't want a social worker in our life'.

And we can say, 'Great, we don't want to be involved in your life either. So, let's figure out how we can demonstrate that there's no reason for us to be worried or concerned. How can we work together to show that there doesn't need to be a social worker involved?' And it means that you don't then hold the responsibility for thinking up of how the parents will change and providing a list of service provisions and expecting them to go and do that, and then being frustrated for whatever reason they don't engage with the service. The other element of that is being clear about, 'What would we need to see in order to be satisfied that social care doesn't need to be involved?' And articulating that to the parents because once you can articulate that, then you say, 'This is what we need to see in order to be satisfied that social workers don't need to be involved.' And I mean that in terms of like, behaviour change within the family.   

[Keeping the purpose of our involvement central] 

Then it's up to them how they go about achieving that change because otherwise what happens is we come in, we say, 'There's a problem with alcohol use, there's a problem with violence. We'll send you on this course over there and we'll send you on that course over there.' And they may or may not engage in that and then we get into conflict about whether they've engaged, the reasons for not engagement but actually, it doesn't matter whether they engage in support services or not fundamentality. What matters is whether they achieve the change that we need to see in order to be satisfied that we don't need to be involved. It might be that they go to-, you know, if they've got a drug and alcohol problem. It might be that they go to the drug and alcohol service that we refer them to. In which case, if they want to, we can make that referral on their behalf. Or it might be that they go to Alcoholics Anonymous of their own accord or it might be that they find some other way of managing or reducing their substance misuse to a degree that it doesn't unduly affect the children and that's the other idea to hold onto. It's not our job to make them happy and to flourish and to live a really positive, healthy life, but as desirable as that would be, our job is to protect children from undue significant harm and that's a very different goal to the more positively framed one because the reality is, for parents that I've worked with, even where I've been pretty successful or they've been successful in addressing some of the key problems. There's still lots of background issues that will compromise their children's safety to some degree. It just won't be to a degree that would warrant statutory involvement. And so, it's about having realistic expectations. 

Donald: That's good. I agree with so much you've said. I mean, we can probably have a whole discussion about the tendency of plans to say, 'You've got to go on a parenting course. You've got to go on a domestic abuse course, you've got to test negative for drugs. As if these provide the safety and security, they just don't. So, we need to be thinking carefully about those. I suppose in relation to some of what you're talking about the statutory context, one of the things I plan to do when I get around to writing it is that I went on quite an interesting course about mentoring last week and I'm going to nick, adapt one of the diagrams there which was about-, that had the mentoring process but I think I would have different stages of a social work interview but in the middle with the two double arrow to each stage of the process was the purpose and I think we have to be thinking constantly about the purpose of our involvement and particularly if we're having statutory involvement in a family that doesn't want it, do our concerns merit telling that parent, 'Well, you have to have a social worker anyway.' Or telling that parent, 'You have to go to the drug and alcohol service.' So, I think we should again, the skills are the servant of a higher thing and that's that the purpose of our involvement with a particular family. Which means we have to be clear about how concerned we are and about the statutory basis of that and whether it's meeting various criteria.

Susan: I can't quite believe how much we've talked about so far. So, skills are the servant to values, but also, skills are the servant to the purpose of our involvement and the need to keep that central. Near the beginning of our conversation, you talked about how if our emotions aren't supported, well contained, processed, or thought through, then this also gets in the way of us being able to exercise our skills and values whole heartedly. Maybe that sits nicely with talking a little bit about how in amongst all of this, we're trying to keep the child or young person in sight. You've both just talked about that core purpose of why we are working with the family and being clear about that, ensuring our attention keeps that focus. So, yes, what do you think is key in terms of how we keep sight of the child or young person?

[Focussing on the parent and child – avoiding binaries]

Donald: So, there's two things. One is it's why we're involved. So, it needs to be pretty constantly on the table. We're not there for all these other reasons, we're there because of the child. So, the child should be part of a lot of conversations. I think also it can help with some of this resistance type stuff. So, if you're arguing with someone about whether they're an alcoholic or not, that's unlikely to be a useful conversation. A much more useful conversation would be, 'I have some concerns around your drinking and Jenny, your child.' And then you can talk about those and then they can give their point of view, and you can actually have a conversation because the thing you should share and usually do share is that you both want what's best for the child.

In the research we did looking at outcomes, I suppose I thought that the empathy caring ones would have a stronger correlation with parental engagement and probably with outcomes, but actually what we found was three variables we had developed that we knew had stronger relationships and those were a sense of purposefulness. So, it was clear what the interview was about, and it is worth noting that in about a third of interviews, we couldn't find out just by listening to it what the point of the meeting was. That's problematic. So, we need social workers who have the authority to guide a meeting and then the second two were some, sort of, clarity about the concerns. Let's say you're checking the fridge, 'Why are you checking the fridge? What's going on there?' And a focus on the child but the focus on the child, you got low scores if there was no focus but to get high scores, you had to collaboratively focus on the child. 

So, it had to be a collaborative discussion about, 'What do you think's going on for the child? What do they need? How are the issues we're talking about related to what's going on for the child?' So, I think the child should be there in every conversation, even if they're not physically there, they should be part of almost every conversation, but Rich, you're more involved in practice now. Well, you are involved in practice now, but what do you think? 

Richard: Yes, I have a couple of thoughts but just before that, Donald. There was that research that you did which highlighted that social workers tended to be focused on the child or the parent and what you are advocating for is both. 

Donald: Yes. Yes, I mean, I masked it as research but what it really was, was-, well, it was trying to make sense of some research findings, but it was actually a description of my own journey. So, I started-, I think I came into social work focused on helping parents quite a lot. I did community work, I did unqualified work. Then I had that revelation I talked about earlier in the podcast about challenging, and I think for a while I was probably quite child-focused and raising difficult issues. But what I think really good work is about is that you can focus on both the parent and the child and keep in mind that you certainly have a vulnerable child, potentially with risks and needs and difficulties, but you will always have a parent who also has their own issues which are maybe quite profound. And at the very least, the fact that they've got a social worker knocking on the door and coming into their house. The easiest thing as a human is just to focus on one thing. Good work involves focusing on both, and I would now say that's because both parties have rights and we need to be thinking about them. But we need to keep them both in mind and that's, sort of, at the heart of good practice. 

Richard: Yes, I just think that's a really useful description and one that will resonate with a lot of practitioners who come in focused on the parent and then perhaps overlook the child, and then they become focused on the child perhaps overlooking the parent. And then it requires a degree of, like, professional maturity to be able to hold both in mind and part of that I do think is influenced by the broader cultural social context. So, for example, we saw after Baby P how there was a massive increase in the rates of care proceedings and that was probably because social workers have become much more child-focused on the exclusion of family preservation and parents' rights and so, the broader context can have an influence on that as well.

But I agree it's about holding onto multiple perspectives. If I'm working with a dad, for example, with an alcohol addiction who's disposed towards being hostile and aggressive, what that would require is compassion towards his behaviour attempting to appreciate that his anger might be motivated by profound fear of needing to change or of losing his child. Some parents can be both frightened and frightening. It would also require the recognition of the harm experienced by his child being cared for by a father dependent on alcohol and behaving aggressively towards the social worker and then also acknowledging the feelings experienced by myself as a result of the fathers' behaviour and using appropriate outlets to share those feelings. So, I think they're key elements of holding onto the child's perspective. And then I think there are a couple of things that we can do. For example, I think the chronology is a really useful tool in terms of understanding the child's lived experiences, finding out after each incident of domestic abuse, for example, where the child was, what they have seen, what they heard, how they reacted at the time, mapping out their development and seeing the trajectory and seeing how their experiences have affected them as well as undertaking meaningful, effective, direct work. 

Susan: Well, I think that's a really important place to end our conversation today. Although I'm sure we could talk for longer. Thank you so much Donald and Richard for your time today and for everything that you offered. I think a lot of practical ideas came out of it but also, that it offers a really expansive reflective space for practitioners as they listen. So, thank you very much for everything you've said and thought about, and we will share links to all the research, books and other resources mentioned today, including both of your work. For example, Rich just mentioned the value of chronologies and I've found your podcast about that very helpful to me personally, Rich, so we'll link to that as well. Goodbye for now and thanks you again Rich and Donald for being here. 

[Outro] 

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