Social Work with Children and Families

Developing Advanced Practice

Penelope Welbourne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136316395
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Études des enfants en sociologie

There is an increasing emphasis on post-qualifying training for social workers, especially in the complex and demanding area of working with children and families. This essential textbook is especially designed for practitioners studying at this level.

Accessible and thorough, the text focuses on a mixture of conceptual and organisational topics, skills, law, policy and key practice issues. It includes chapters on:

• Social work values and ethics
• Risk, uncertainty and accountability
• Direct work with children and young people
• Promoting security and stability
• Working with reluctant service users
• Assessment of parenting
• Working with poverty, drugs and alcohol
• Going to court and the legal framework
• Children and young people going home
• Supporting others in their professional development.

Using case studies and activities to link research, theory and practice, Social Work with Children and Families takes a wider look at the role and tasks of an experienced social work practitioner, and the skills and knowledge needed to develop professionally from this point.

Part 1

Child- and family-centred social work

1 Hearing children’s voices and respecting children’s wishes and feelings, part 1

Trust, communication and support

This chapter:

• considers what we mean when we talk about ‘listening to children’;

• reviews the legal basis for listening to children;

• encourages thought about the way children and young people are viewed, in society and in social work practice.

Not everyone is impressed with the idea that children’s best interests, let alone their wishes and feelings, should influence what adults do. Guggenheim has argued that ‘[a] significant number of adults who ought to know better have taken far too seriously the importance of furthering the child’s best interests. … Indeed, it is astonishing to observe how much the best interests and child-centered rhetoric is taken seriously by countless children’s advocates’ (Guggenheim 2005: 157). Munro (2011: 135) reminds us that, given ‘the depressing evidence on outcomes for looked after children in adult life, humility about our ability to know what is in children’s best interests seems to be the appropriate emotion.’ It is the latter position that is central to social work with children and young people: avoiding rhetoric and practising with care.

Ofsted (2011) lists five ‘main messages’ for practice with regard to the voice of the child (see box on page 6). These messages come from studies of cases in which there was child death or other serious incident relating to a child, so the material they draw on is not, one hopes, representative of all child care cases. On the other hand, there is at present no research that tells us if cases in which children came to serious harm or died are atypical cases in many respects, or atypical solely with reference to what happened to the child. Using Reason’s (2000) model of active and latent errors (see Chapter 7), it is possible that many of the ‘errors’¹ identified in Serious Case Reviews are common in social work practice with children and young people, although few come to harm as a result because other factors prevent it from happening. Equally, it may be that ‘typical’ practice avoids such mistakes. In either event, we cannot afford not to learn from analysis of cases in which things went wrong, so that the important things that are discovered about good practice can be consolidated, and areas in which practice needs to be developed are improved. Children’s social care agencies, and those who work in them, should consider how practice can be made proof against making these particular mistakes.

Box 1.1 Five main messages from the 2011 Ofsted review of the voice of the child in Serious Case Reviews

• The child was not seen frequently enough by the professionals involved, or was not asked about their views and feelings.

• Agencies did not listen to adults who tried to speak on behalf of the child and who had important information to contribute.

• Parents and carers prevented professionals from seeing and listening to the child.

• Practitioners focused too much on the needs of the parents, especially on vulnerable parents, and overlooked the implications for the child.

• Agencies did not interpret their findings well enough to protect the child.

Ofsted 2011: 6

The report notes that often the children involved were too young to speak for themselves, but some practitioners found ways of being responsive to their expressed feelings and wishes, even though those wishes and feelings were expressed non-verbally. Verbal communication is only one aspect of communication. Young children and those who find it difficult to say what they would like to say in words may have become adept at finding other ways of expressing their feelings and their wishes. Behaviour as diverse as clinginess, running away from home, self-harm and social withdrawal may all be ways of expressing things that it is hard for the child or young person to put into words. Once a wider definition of ‘expressed wishes and feelings’ is brought into use, the scope for hearing children’s wishes becomes very broad.

One thing that is essential for hearing children’s wishes and feelings is actually spending time with the child. Parents, teachers, relatives and others who know a child well may be able to give a good account of the child’s wishes and feelings as they see them. People who know the child well may be able to discuss difficult issues with them more easily than the social worker – but children may also be reluctant to speak openly, about abuse, neglect or feelings of despair, with people who they think may have a stake in thinking well of the people who care for them, or thinking badly of them, or who might be shocked and distressed to hear what they think. Information from ‘third parties’ is not a substitute for seeing and speaking to a child directly, however helpful and well-intentioned the friends, relatives and other informants may be. Both sources of information about children’s wishes and feelings are important. Listening to adults who speak on behalf of the child is important (Ofsted 2011), but not everyone who speaks on behalf of a child will be representing the child’s experiences, wishes and feelings accurately.

Social workers may reflect on the ways they ‘see’ children, not on a practical day-to-day basis, but conceptually. One’s own experiences in childhood, and experience of being with children as an adult – as a parent, a professional, a relative or a friend, for example – may shape the way one thinks about children as a social worker. James describes four ways of seeing children:

• The developing child: incomplete, lacking in status and competence: voice not to be taken (too) seriously.

• The tribal child: living in a conceptually different world from adults, separate from adults and having their own rules and agendas: part of an independent culture, worthy of study in its own right.

• The adult child: competent participants in a shared but adult-centred world: socially competent in ways comparable to adults.

• The social child: children have different but not necessarily inferior competences from adults: affords them the same status as adults. (James 1995 cited in Mantle et al. 2007: 790)

Box 1.2 Exercise: ways of ‘seeing’ children

Think about three or four children who you know of different ages and in different contexts. Do you recognise any of the above ways of seeing children in the way you think about your own relationships with those children? When you relate to them, is it consistently according to one of the ‘ways of seeing’, or does the way you see and relate to the children vary? What determines which ‘mode of seeing’ dominates at any one time?

Keeping the focus on the child, not the tasks

Social workers carry out bureaucratic functions such as reviews of care plans. They are also called on to act as an ‘agent of social control’, for example when a Secure Accommodation Order is being considered for a young person. They assess need and risk. While these are core tasks, relationships with children and young people are all too readily structured around these tasks, rather than making the relationship with the young person or child a matter of importance in its own right because of what it contributes to understanding the child’s needs. Social work is particularly easily adapted to accommodate the demands of bureaucratic elements such as ‘form-filling’. Such pressures undermine capacity for developing meaningful relationships with children and young people. For children in care, in particular, there is a danger that minimum expectations in terms of frequency of contact easily become ‘normalised’ into baseline standards for frequency of visits. If meeting children in care happens because there is a schedule to be followed, not because the child needs or merits a visit in themselves, the child is likely to understand this and this will affect how they view you.

What do adults mean by ‘listening’ to children, and what do children mean when they say they want to be listened to?

Listening is a term that is understood differently by adults in different contexts. At its most basic, it is a matter of hearing what someone has to say, or paying attention to communication that may be non-verbal, such as written information or thoughts expressed through specialist communication systems. It is different from ‘hearing’ in that it implies a purposeful activity: one may hear without intending to do so; listening requires attention and an effort to understand what is being expressed. Social work arguably uses the idea of ‘listening’ in a very particular way, and ideas about ‘active listening’ and body language may be stressed. Children may have quite a different understanding. The potential for miscommunication about communication is great.

It is unlikely that children think of listening as a skill: research indicates they consider listening is associated with paying attention and taking what is said seriously. It means more than just hearing, or even paying attention: it may mean listening and paying attention to what is said, and doing something differently as a result. Many children in care felt well listened to, but there is scope for improvement. Roger Morgan, Children’s Rights Director for England, found that:

Most children (65%) said they are asked usually or a lot about things that matter to them, and 63% said their views are taken as seriously as an adult’s views. A majority (60%) said their views make quite a bit or a lot of difference; 77% are usually or always told what changes are going to happen in their lives.

Morgan 2007: 5

For the trained social worker, active listening has the specialist meaning of demonstrating that the other person has been heard and listened to with care and attention during the conversation. Body language on the part of the listener is important, as it helps to show that one has understood what has been said. For children, the manner in which one listens may be very important, giving messages to the child about the value being placed on what they say, but what happens next is really important: carrying the message away and, the child hopes, acting on it. The children in McLeod’s (2010) study had very different ideas from the social workers about what constitutes good ‘listening’. For them, listening was definitely not about the attitude of the listener so much as the listener’s willingness to take action on what they heard. One child described her social worker as sitting, apparently listening and nodding, but because nothing changed as a result, she felt the social worker was not really listening at all.

This is not surprising given the way parents often use ‘listening’, as in: ‘If you had listened to me you would have done your homework already’. Listening as used in families frequently means: ‘Do something you would not otherwise have done, as a result of listening to me’. It is not surprising if children sometimes use the term this way themselves. Social workers need to be able to do both kinds of listening: conveying a sense of interest and respect for the child’s views and wishes; and follow through, when this is what the child reasonably expects to happen. Being clear with the child about what will happen as a result of the conversation is important to build trust and make speaking to social workers seem worthwhile.

McLeod (2006) studied social workers’ own accounts of what it means to ‘listen’ as an attitude: a receptive process. They used the term in a way that was consistent with an ethic of openness and respect – paying attention and taking what is said seriously. They also wanted to find out about children’s feelings, consistent with the requirement that they should take children’s ‘wishes and feelings’ into account. The social workers in McLeod’s study had an expectation that they should find out about children’s feelings, even hidden and painful ones, but McLeod notes ‘none of the workers made reference to any theoretical base; it just seemed to be taken for granted as practice wisdom’ (McLeod 2006: 48). This raises the question of how social workers think about the personal information they ask children, and indeed adults, to provide them with.

Sometimes it will be clear why the information is needed: perhaps to help a court decide on the best residence and contact arrangements for a child when her parents are divorcing. On other occasions, it may be less clear to the child and even perhaps to the worker why information is being sought, and the purpose to which it may be put. Children in care sometimes complain about an expectation that they will tell their story over again to every new social worker allocated to them. For the social worker, this may be a way of getting to hear the child’s authentic view of what has happened to them to support the development of a working relationship. However, if nothing appears to change as a result of this sharing of information, which is often deeply personal and highly significant to the child, the reluctance to go through the process again with a new worker is understandable.

If the object of a discussion with a child is to find out from the child his or her views on what has happened in the past, and much of this is already recorded on file, it may be better to find out from the child or young person how they feel about telling their story again. Repeated telling of the same story may be therapeutic, as each new telling brings out different features of the story and helps to create a coherent narrative. On the other hand, for some children, it may feel like an imposition or evidence that what they say is not really taken seriously: why else would they need to keep repeating it? The purpose of the conversation with the child makes a difference. A belief that the worker cares enough to treat the information with care and respect is also very important to children (Staller 2007). Trust in the worker, a safe place to talk in, and a belief that something positive will ensue – effective action will be taken – are all important.

If we can increase our understanding of children’s thoughts, feelings and hopes for the future, this will ‘contribute to a more accurate assessment of the likely outcomes of different care plan options’ (Schofield 2005: 29). Having chosen an option for a child, McLeod (2006) notes that the children in her study who had been the subject of the most extensive efforts at direct work and eliciting feelings when they were younger tended to be making better progress than those who had not been. Persevering in gaining trust appears to have a positive effect on children’s well-being.

Some practitioners writing reports for courts use the report they write after talking to children to check that they have ‘got it right’ for the child. They also sometimes re-phrase children’s views in ways they judge they will be less likely to cause embarrassment for the child or anger to be directed at the child. This may not always be possible, however. Sometimes children’s views are both important and likely to cause someone else – perhaps a parent – distress or anger (Mantle et al. 2007). The implications of the desire to protect them from the consequences of discussing their true wishes and feelings should be considered carefully.

With older children, maybe eleven and above, I will show them the piece of the report that relates to them. … I will make a further appointment to go back and check with them, that what I’ve written is an accurate reflection of what they intended, because I’m always conscious that I may have interpreted wrongly. Also, by the third visit I’ll have checked out – I think last time you told me this, is that right? – or – I understand that this is how you feel, tell ...