Children's Services

Working Together

Malcolm Hill, Sir George Head, Andrew Lockyer, Barbara Reid, Raymond Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138172166
• eBook ISBN: 9781317861850
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

Childrens Services: Working Together brings together contributions from a number of authors in the field. The book covers policy, theory, research and practice relevant to students and professionals working with children in a wide range of roles. The emphasis on working collaboratively with other professionals, where appropriate, and the holistic approach to children make this a valuable resource to anyone working with children today.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Malcolm Hill, George Head, Andrew Lockyer, Barbara Reid and Raymond Taylor

Few individuals who work with children do so in isolation from other professions and organisations. For most, successful performance of their particular role requires cooperation with others. In recent years, children’s policies in the UK have emphasised the need for a shared commitment by everyone to promoting children’s health, welfare, learning and their ability to contribute responsibly to society. Various terms have been deployed to express this vision, from working together to integrated services.

This book is intended to provide knowledge about policy, theory, research and practice relevant to all professionals who work with children and those training to join such professions. A volume of this size cannot attempt to cover comprehensively the detailed understanding required in any particular profession. Rather, it complements more specialist texts by concentrating on topics of common interest related to children and their lives, and to ways in which interprofessional collaboration can be enhanced. It provides some core knowledge, ideas and values relevant to anyone working with children and offers critical awareness of the issues that arise when people of different training, experience and organisational settings collaborate.

Several broad themes permeate the book:

an emphasis on situations when different types of profession and agency work together for the sake of the children and families they are seeking to help;

an holistic approach to children, which requires understanding multiple dimensions of their lives and the key people and circumstances with which they interact;

the importance of approaches that involve working with children, their families and other community members as active participants;

the need for reflective practitioners, aware of the influences and assumptions shaping their own training and everyday work, and empathic towards the values and knowledge bases of different professionals;

the importance of understanding organisational and interpersonal influences on the work of professionals and especially on interprofessional cooperation;

recognition of a wide range of relevant clusters of theories, e.g. related to children, families, organisations and groups;

critical awareness of key concepts shared by a number of professions, but open to varying interpretation and application, e.g. rights, risk, needs, agency, learning, social capital, attachment and resilience;

recognition that there are different perspectives within and between professional and academic disciplines, which involve complementarity, differences in emphasis and, at times, tension or conflict.

The key principle underpinning these themes and the book is that all professionals working with children should pay close attention to connectedness – of different elements of children’s lives; between children and their family, friends and communities; among agencies and professionals. Naturally the salience of connectedness will vary according to the particular functions of an individual practitioner and the circumstances they are dealing with. At times, specialist roles and skills will be applicable and predominate, as when children are in a maths class or a young person attends accident and emergency services with a serious injury. Even then the situation is not entirely one of learning or medical treatment, because the Children’s experiences and responses will be affected by such matters as their home backgrounds, the meanings they attribute to what is happening to them, peer relationships, availability of educational or emotional support and so on.

The rest of this chapter briefly reviews different ways of understanding children and childhood, and then considers the service, legal and policy context for working with children.

What is a child?

The answer to this question may seem obvious, but ideas about children and childhood have varied greatly across time and culture (Zwozdiak-Myers 2007; Pressler 2010). During the Middle Ages, children engaged in work and play alongside adults soon after infancy, and were usually dressed the same as adults. In traditional farming or herding societies across the world children from 6 or 7 years upwards have usually taken responsibility for care of animals, fields and younger siblings and cousins. By contrast, nowadays we tend to think of children as depending on adults materially and emotionally for a substantial number of years. They are rarely seen in adult work and leisure places, but spend much time in locations devoted largely or exclusively to children (early years centres, schools, clubs etc.) Nevertheless, considerable cultural and individual variations occur in beliefs and values about children, including different emphases on individual fulfilment or extended family commitments, the influence of nature and nurture, appropriate forms of behaviour and punishment etc.

It can be tempting to consider children largely in terms of what they lack. In other words, they do not have the competence, power, status, knowledge, experience and understanding that adults possess. It is only a short step to regarding childhood as simply a period for making good deficiencies and preparing to be adult. Much recent academic thinking, however, highlights the need to consider children’s current activities, perspectives and pre-occupations as important in their own right, of inherent worth ‘for now’ and not only for possible future benefits. This is linked to recognition that children have ‘agency’, i.e. capacities to shape their own lives. This is obviously within limitations arising from immediate and wider circumstances, but children are not merely the products of influential adults around them (Mayall 2002).

The boundaries of childhood are fluid. Debates about abortion highlight that, for some people and in certain respects, a foetus in the womb can be seen as already a child. At the other end of childhood, the extension of education over the past two centuries or so has increased the length of time that children may be financially dependent. Associated with this has been a growing view that children have distinct needs and rights until well into their teens. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, introduced in 1989 and subsequently ratified by nearly every nation state, indicates that the 18th birthday should normally be the upper limit for the special rights attributed to children (see below). This is the practice accepted in the UK, although a wide range of age thresholds exists for such matters as criminal responsibility, school-leaving, driving, marrying and voting.

Although teenagers are legally still ‘children’ in the above sense, most would not describe themselves as such and many of them would be insulted to be called a child. It is, therefore, common to use the phrase ‘young people’ for older children.¹ Similarly, when reference is made to children in school, use of ‘pupil’ is increasingly restricted to primary school, and ‘student’ preferred in secondary, as well as in further and higher education. The term ‘adolescent’ is widely employed by psychologists, psychiatrists and others as representing the period of (literally) becoming adult, but is disliked by some people for having negative connotations (immature, troublesome). Young people collectively are sometimes referred to as ‘youth’, with distinct cultures and activities, although in North America youth can include younger children too. Matters to do with crime committed by young people are generally described under the umbrella of youth justice.

Diverse and changing childhoods in the UK

In many ways family life has become more diverse over the past half century. Lower rates of marriage and increases in separation and divorce have resulted in more lone-parent households (nearly one quarter of children), a larger proportion of reconstituted families with step- and half-siblings and greater numbers of children growing up with couples who live together on a long-term basis but are not married, including gay couples (Hill 2009a; Maplethorpe et al. 2009). The percentage of mothers who work has grown markedly. Some commentators have seen these trends as an unfortunate erosion of traditional family patterns; others as representing greater choice, with fewer adults and children trapped in unhappy or abusive relationships.

Ethnic diversity has become commonplace, particularly in cities and towns. The great majority of black and ethnic minority children are born and brought up in Britain, though usually with some degree of dual or multiple identities, reflecting the customs and religion of their families’ countries of origin (Modood 2007). Early years services, schools and other agencies nowadays make considerable efforts to value the cultures present in their catchment areas and to attend where necessary to language issues. However, even well-meaning professionals from a different ethnic background to a given child may fail to understand the significance of language, family communication and attitudes – for example, in relation to eating disorders or mental health problems (Jackson et al. 2008).

Rates of child poverty in the UK diminished in the first decade of the new millennium, but still remain higher than in some other countries in western Europe (Bradshaw and Mayhew 2005; Hamilton 2011). Lone-parent households and certain minority ethnic groups are over-represented among the poor (Hansen et al. 2010a). Economic and social disparities are closely linked to inequalities in child health and educational performance (Marmot 2010).

‘Childhood … is increasingly saturated by technology’ (Hutchby and Moran-Ellis 2001, p. 1). Rapid changes have exposed children to a wider range of information and influence beyond the family and school, resulting in myriad effects on their communication, activities and culture. Patterns of computer use tend to vary with gender, ethnicity and family income (Hansen et al. 2010a). Opportunities and risks abound, which professionals need to keep up with (Livingstone 2009).

How do and should we envisage childhood?

Many specialist theories and concepts have been used to aid understanding of children, of which a few are considered in Part III of the book. Here we consider three broad frameworks that emphasise respectively:

1. how children change as they grow older;

2. how children can shape what happens to them, in the context of socially produced assumptions;

3. environment influences and settings.

Developmental approaches

Academic thinking about children in the twentieth century was largely dominated by child psychology and applications of psychological analysis in fields such as education and child psychiatry. Child psychology textbooks and journals remain valuable compendia of knowledge about children, usually organised on different broad age groupings and/or dimensions like physical, cognitive and social (e.g. Lindon 2005).

For the most part, child psychology and associated disciplines have taken a developmental perspective, i.e. seeing children as evolving and improving in various ways as they grow older, building on earlier achievements. This clearly links to the commonsense observation that, with increasing age, children typically get bigger, move more adeptly and quickly, learn to speak, extend their intellectual skills, and so on. Several key theorists have presented such progressions in terms of stages occurring at roughly similar times for most children, e.g. Freud (psycho-sexual development), Piaget (changes in ways of thinking), Erikson (psycho-social development) and Kohlberg (moral reasoning). A related concept is that of developmental milestones, a level of functioning achieved by most children at roughly the same age in a given culture, such as standing, walking and talking. It can be helpful to identify children who achieve such milestones late, or maybe not all, so that they can be given appropriate treatment or extra help. This has been the purpose of the Sheridan charts used in public health and early years services for several decades. There are, though, dangers of exaggerating the significance of natural variations and of stigmatising those who differ from the norm.

Other important conceptualisations of development have not been stage-based, or only loosely so. These include attachment theory dealing with care-giving and children’s intimate relationships, and approaches derived from the Russian theorist Vygotsky concerning children’s active engagement with their environments and interpretations using language and signs, both discussed later in the book.

The social construction approach to childhood

During the 1990s a growing critique of developmental psychology occurred, leading to the creation of an alternative paradigm in the social studies of childhood (James and Prout 1998). The key idea is that both lay and expert expectations and understandings of children are socially constructed. This does not mean that all ideas about children are socially determined, since the biological basis of some phenomena is accepted (Prout 2005), but the precise ways in which childhood is regarded and experienced are crucially shaped by interaction with the cultural and historical context and prevailing assumptions (Zwozdiak-Myers 2007).

The social constructionist approach to childhood was initiated in sociology, anthropology and history, but has extended to other subject areas such as geography, as well as influencing applied disciplines. It challenged what it saw as the main tenets in developmental psychology:

childhood is largely biologically driven and comprises relatively fixed stages;

children are lacking in adult competence, and childhood is primarily about developing knowledge and skills as a preparation for adulthood;

children are largely moulded by adult socialisation;

variations in childhood experience are typically treated in terms of factors like age, gender and ethnicity whose influence is best examined by means of statistical analysis.

This portrayal exaggerated the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Brief contents
• Detailed contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Part I Children's Services
• Part II Community and Participation
• Part III Evidence and Theory for Practice with Children and Families
• Part IV Working Together: Challenges and Opportunities
• Bibliography
• Index