Social Work with Children and Families

Getting into Practice Third Edition

Ian Butler, Caroline Hickman

• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781843105985
• eBook ISBN: 9780857005564
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

This key text covers the knowledge and skills that social workers need to get into practice with children and families.

The book covers core components of child and family work such as building effective relationships, assessment, child protection practice and working with the law. Clear and accessible, this practical book features case studies, questions and exercises throughout. This third edition covers the very latest developments in child and family work, including changes in professional practice that emphasise the importance of understanding child development and observation skills.

Social Work with Children and Families is an indispensable text for social workers, allied health professionals, psychologists and students of social work and child care.

Part I

Developing Basic Knowledge and Skills

UNIT 1

Children and Childhood

OBJECTIVES

In this unit you will:

• Reflect on your own and others’ experience of childhood.

• Examine how childhood is socially constructed.

• Extend your understanding of children’s developmental needs.

• Examine your understanding of children’s rights and their relationship to a child’s needs.

Course Text: PLAYING CHILDREN

As these words are being written, there is a game of cricket in progress outside. The batsman is aged six and the bowler thirteen. The six-year-old is taking the game very seriously. In between balls, he is practising shots, examining the pitch and checking for any changes to the field settings. The thirteen-year-old is messing about, running up to bowl on ‘wobbly legs’ and broadcasting a much exaggerated, and very loud, commentary on the game. From his desk, their father is watching the game. He is caught between knowing that he has to finish this chapter and desperately wanting to go out and play. By staring out of the window, he manages to do neither and, out of frustration, shouts at the players to take their game elsewhere. Which one of these three could best be described as being a child or as behaving like one?

It seems entirely appropriate that we should begin this book with a question about children. We suspect that everyone would claim to know something already about the subject and it is a sound educational principle to ask questions only when one has a reasonable expectation of receiving an answer. It’s obvious who the children are, isn’t it? Possibly, but on what basis do we decide? Age doesn’t seem to be the determining factor; the six-year-old is the one behaving in the most recognizably ‘grown-up’ way. Size isn’t decisive either as the thirteen-year-old is just as tall as his dad and, as for knowledge and skills, all three are as good (or as bad) as each other when it comes to cricket. If we were to ask these three characters themselves how they might respond to being likened to children, the thirteen-year-old, despite his behaviour, is the one most likely to object and the forty-year-old, within reason, is the one most likely to be pleased at being mistaken for someone younger. The six-year-old wouldn’t expect to be referred to as anything else. Perhaps the answer to our question is not quite so obvious after all.

Few of the everyday terms and ‘common-sense’ ideas encountered in social work with children and families, such as ‘childhood’, ‘family’ or ‘parenthood’, are as straightforward as they first appear. It is central to the purpose of this book to explore the meaning of such terms and to recognize how our understanding of them might affect our practice. If we were to look at childhood beyond this trivial example, across generations and geographical boundaries, then our sense of what the term means would become much less certain and clear-cut. What are the similarities and differences between these three lives and those of the thousands of young people who, in the thirteenth century, went off to fight in the Children’s Crusade? Or with the daily lives of those children press-ganged into the eighteenth-century Navy or who, not much more than a century ago, pulled wagons of coal to the earth’s surface just a few miles from where these words were written? What links the experiences of these children with the 40,000 others who will die today and every day from malnutrition or the 150 million more who live on in poor health across the world?

This Unit is about children or, more accurately, social work in relation to our understanding of children. The first exercise in this Unit and the Study Text that follows it are intended to sensitize you to the variability of childhood and encourage you to question some of the assumptions you and others may make about it.

Exercise 1.1: Images of Childhood

Assemble a selection of recent newspapers and general interest magazines. Look through them for pictures of children. All kinds of images (including advertisements) should be included. Once you have collected about twenty images, spread them out so that you can see all of them at once.

TASKS

1. ‘Quickthink’^[1] a few words that you associate with each image.

2. Write down for what specific purpose you think each image is being used.

3. Write down what each image reminds you of about your own childhood or those of children for whom you are personally or professionally responsible.

Then complete the following sentence with at least ten different answers:

Childhood is…

Points to Consider

1. Does your collection of images suggest that childhood is experienced or represented differently depending on gender or race, for example? If so, how?

2. Would you say that there are any universal components to the experience of childhood? If so, what are they?

3. Overall, do the images suggest that children are highly valued in contemporary society? What qualities/attributes seem particularly valued or discounted?

4. Do you detect any differences between how you, as an adult, and the children in the images might describe what each image contains?

5. How much of what you understand by childhood is determined by your own experience of it do you think?

6. Would you like to be a child again? What is attractive/unattractive about the idea?

Study Text 1.1: The Myths of Childhood

In broad terms, the history of childhood has been described as a gradual process whereby the ‘distance in behaviour and whole psychological structure between children and adults increases in the course of the civilizing process’ (Elias 1939, p.xiii). This particular view of the history of the separation of (Western) childhood from adulthood, developed in quite different ways by Aries (1960), de Mause (1976), Shorter (1976) and Stone (1977), and subsequently criticized, not least on historical grounds, by Pollock (1983) and MacFarlane (1986), now constitutes something of an orthodoxy (see, for example, Hayden and others 1999, James and James 2003). Aries’ central thesis, to take perhaps the best-known example, was that, in early-medieval European society, childhood as a recognizable set of social roles and expectations did not exist and that the transition from the physical dependency of infancy to the social maturity of adulthood was unbroken. Young people quite literally occupied the same social, economic and psychological space as older people, playing, working and sharing relationships on much the same terms. According to Aries, ‘childhood’, as a distinct set of social roles and expectations, was ‘discovered’ in the fifteenth century, slowly diffusing throughout European society over the next three hundred years or so.

Whatever the historical accuracy of such accounts as Aries’, their importance for our purposes lies in the contribution they made to the development of what has been called the ‘theoretically plausible space called the social construction of childhood’ (James and Prout 1997, p.27). Put simply, this idea, which stems from a tradition in sociology that is concerned with the meaning rather than the function of social events and processes, implies that very little of what we associate with children or the kind of childhood that they experience is universal, fixed or certain. In fact, childhood is built up, or ‘constructed’, in society and is occupied by young people in much the same way that adults occupy the various social roles available to them; for example, ‘parent’, ‘worker’, ‘middle-aged’. (However, see Hockey and James 2003 for a detailed analysis of the part that differential power relations play in the process of ‘construction’.) Hence, the meaning, social significance and experience of childhood will vary across time, even within generations and between cultures, as the society in which it is embedded changes and develops. (See Montgomery, Burr and Woodhead 2003 for a broad international perspective on the experience and nature of childhood and for some more detailed, specific cross-cultural analyses, see, for example, Kenney 2007 and Nieuwenhuys 2009).

An appreciation of childhood as a social artefact like many others allows social scientists to ask interesting questions about why it should take a particular form at any given time and what historical, social and cultural processes shape the social realities that young people have to face. It also allows questions to be asked about whose interests are best served by any particular construction of childhood, especially which generational interests are dominant. More important, understanding childhood as a social construction requires us, as adult professionals or simply as professional adults, to question our ‘taken for granted’ understanding of children and childhood and to recognize that our account is not the only one possible.

From a sociological point of view, how childhood is ‘constructed’ may say as much about us and the society we live in as it does about the real lives of the children we encounter. Indeed, opinions about childhood are as variable as the lived experiences of children. As well as recognizing that there are significant differences in what childhood is and how it is experienced, we also have to recognize that there are differences of opinion over what it ought to be too. Childhood, in this sense, is a normative category (one that seeks to establish a standard or ‘norm’) as well as a descriptive one. A great deal of the debate about children and young people in the media, for example, is often carried on in terms of the declining ‘state of the nation’s children’ which is then used as a form of commentary on the declining state of the nation itself (see Pearson 1992).

At an individual level too, it is difficult to escape the personal, social and cultural assumptions that we bring to our understanding of childhood and our understanding of individua...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Preface to the Third Edition
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Introduction
• How to Use This Book
• Part I Developing Basic Knowledge and Skills
• PART II Developing Specialist Knowledge and Skills