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What we know is that working with hostile avoidant families causes a really high level
of stress amongst a lot of workers, a lot of anxiety about how to approach these families
and how to meet the needs of the children. What we also know from serious case reviews,
from research is that a lot of situations occur when people are not able to see children,
which places them at a great level of risk. We also know that fear of families, and a
reluctance to challenge can mean that in some cases children go unprotected and are at serious
risk of harm. It’s important to look at reasons behind
people’s behaviour, parents behaviour, it's important to look at the reasons why people
may not engage with services. Sometimes this maybe to do with their previous
experience of services, their own issues, mental health problems or drug or alcohol
abuse. We look at the reasons for this behaviour,
not so we can except it but so that we can begin to start working with parents and we
can begin to make effective plans and approaches. There are particular skills that we can learn
and we can develop to help us to work with families and to challenge them in a constructive
and authoritative way. I base a lot of my work on issues around the
skills of assertiveness, I find that it is really helpful for workers to develop a repertoire
of things to say, words, phrases, attitudes which mean that we can challenge parents in
a helpful authoritative way but not lose sight of the needs of the child.
We need to be clear when parents behaviour is getting in the way of a clear assessment
of the child’s needs, either because they're confrontational or because they're avoiding
our work. We also need to be clear about the impact
of any hostile or aggressive behaviour not only on the workers but on the child themselves.
I also think it is important to consider the emotional impact of this work our decision
making a lot of the time as well as being based on what we think a lot of it is based
on what we feel, we need to trust our intuition, we need to listen to our feelings, if we are
feeling frightened or feeling anxious that will affect how we think and how we plan and
work with families. What we need to do is try to find situations
in our workplace where we are able to talk about our fears, how we are working with this
family and how that reflects on the interagency network and there are certainly situations
where it is not safe for workers to be working with families.
We need to be clear about staff safety we need to be clear about when it isn't safe
for workers to be with families, but then relate that to risk to the children.