Children's Needs – Parenting Capacity - Digital Education Resource ...

6 Children’s Needs – Parenting Capacityinvolvement in assessments, plans and reviews. Research shows that many socialworkers go to considerable lengths to explain things to parents (particularly thosewith learning disabilities) and children, and to involve them as much as possible inall stages of the child protection process (Cleaver and Walker with Meadows 2004).A second finding is that professionals tend to evade frightening confrontations; afeature which continues to be identified in serious case reviews (Brandon et al. 2009,2010; Department for Education 2010c; Lord Laming 2009). Research suggeststhat when professionals feel unsupported or must visit alone, visiting and childprotection enquiries might not always be as thorough as they could be (James 1994;Denny 2005; Farmer 2006).GenderFew of the 1995 child protection studies explored parental problems in terms ofgender and whether the gender of the parent with the problem influenced socialwork intervention. Irrespective of which parental figure was presenting the problem,professionals focused their attention on working with mothers. In some cases,despite prolonged domestic violence directed from a father figure to the motherand suspicions that the man was also physically abusive to the children, fathers wererarely involved in the child protection work. ‘The shift of focus from men to womenallowed men’s violence to their wives or partners to disappear from sight’ (Farmer 2006,p.126). However, for some families the possibility of social workers engaging withthe father figure was difficult because he refused to discuss the child with the worker,was always out during social work visits or no longer lived in the household (Farmer2006).Interpreting behaviourA final factor identified by the original child protection studies, and still pertinenttoday, is that social workers may misinterpret parents’ behaviour (Department forEducation 2010c; HM Government 2010a; C4EO 2010). For example, researchhas shown that social workers were likely to assume that guilty or evasive behaviourof parents was related to child abuse. But such behaviour was, on occasions, foundto be the result of parents wanting to keep secret a history of mental illness, learningdisability, illicit drug use or other family problems (Cleaver and Freeman 1995).In contrast, the apparent co-operation of some parents may result in practitionersapplying the ‘rule of optimism’ (Dingwell et al. 1983). This stems from a number ofassumptions – the strongest being that parents love their children and want the bestfor them, and that children’s lives are better if they stay at home, even if that homeis very dysfunctional. The application of the rule of optimism may result in overlypositive interpretations of what parents say and of the behaviour and circumstancesobserved. Research suggests that ‘over-confidence in “knowing” the parent or carer,might lead to misjudgement, over-identification with parents or GPs not seeing concernsabout children’ (Tompsett et al. 2009, p.3). In these circumstances practitionersmay too readily accept parents’ explanations of events and be reluctant to challenge