At the DI conference in Sofia, last month, Professor Andy Bilson warned people who are involved in social work and alternative care that we need to stop seeing parents as ‘the problem’ and start making them part of the solution. And he made a very strong case for this.
He started by pointing out that when a country starts the deinstitutionalisation process, they need to watch out not to fall into the trap of ending up settling for reorganisation rather than taking it all the way to care reform. Reorganisation is simply the process of moving children from institutions to family-based care or small scale residential care, while care reform includes putting in place systems to support families and to prevent children from entering into care. In the former situation, the same number of children continue to enter into care, while in the latter, far more children are able to grow up in their own families. And this should be the aim of the move from institutional to family-based care.
Not least because research has shown again and again that children generally do better when they grow up in their family, even when the family’s circumstances are less than ideal. This is where good-enough-care comes into play, this is what social workers should be looking for when assessing families, rather than seeing if a family provides ideal care.
Professor Bilson even mentioned a study in Australia that found that outcomes for children in care (including in foster care) were worse than those for abused children who remained in their own families.
Involving parents is essential in reducing the number of children who end up being removed from their families. As Professor Bilson pointed out: child rights = parent rights. There sometimes seems to be a view that yes, under Child Rights we should provide children with the support they need to stay alive and develop well, however, no such obligation is acknowledged with regards to making sure that parents have living accommodation where they can safely care for their children, or have an income with which they can feed their children. The suggestion of ‘just’ providing adults with a place to live or with a source of income is often laughed off the table. Without anyone seeming to notice that if you do not support the parents to provide these things for their children, the children will not get them. Meaning that their Child Rights are breached either by them not having a safe living space and food, or by being removed from their family ‘for their protection’.
Professor Bilson was able to point out to successes achieved, with regards to his claim that involving parents in the system, reduces the number of children in care. In New York, they used this system and the number of children in care was reduced from 50,000 to 9,000, and stayed steady at that number, in contrast to other states where parents were not involved in the system and there was no decline in numbers of children in care.
Under his programme parents were involved in helping and supporting each other, in advocacy on cases, advocacy on the programme itself and advocacy on policy.
I believe it is very important to take the children’s parents and wider family into account and give them a role in either supporting them to be able to continue to care for their children or in organising alternative care for them. Both to prevent separation and to create a more positive attitude towards the process with the parents and through them, with the children.
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