Advice from a Community Care Inform guide on how to support behaviour change in parents whose children are in care
This article presents a few key considerations from Community Care Inform Children’s guide on supporting the behaviour change of parents whose children are in care.
This includes the tools and services social workers can use to support parents.
Inform Children subscribers can access the full guide here.
This guide was written by Dan Martin, principal officer for social care at the National Children’s Bureau.
The context
The government has placed even greater emphasis on the need for social workers to engage with birth parents and families, both to avoid children becoming looked after in the first place and to prioritise them returning home when they have been removed.
Published in 2023, the Children’s Social Care National Framework, which is statutory guidance on the purpose of children’s social care, includes the following statements:
- ‘Every area listens to the views of families and family networks when children and young people need to be cared for by the local authority, so that appropriate plans, which are in children and young people’s best interests, can be made. Clear and sensitive information and advice is able for families and family networks to understand the decisions being made for children and young people.’ (p51)
- ‘Practitioners work with families and family networks, supporting them to access services that aid their wellbeing. Wherever possible, practitioners promote reunification.’ (p57-58)
Supporting behaviour change
Social workers often find themselves being asked to support parents to change their behaviour to improve their capacity to care for their children.
Through court proceedings, social workers are asked to assess whether it will be possible for a child to return to their parents’ care and parents of children who are looked after long term may apply to discharge a care order on the basis that their circumstances have changed to a level where their child could be in their care.
Social workers often refer parents to other service providers to support behaviour change, and this may be effective, although it will be the social workers’ assessment that matters.
Moreover, there are a range of skills, strategies and practice models social workers can use directly with parents to promote behaviour change.
Parenting skills work
Whether or not you are in care proceedings, at some point you will probably be expected to undertake work to build and develop birth parents’ capabilities and skills. The outcome of one or more specialist assessments will often determine the focus of this work, but when you are starting with limited information, I would recommend the following process:
(1) Audit:
All parents possess skill and experience that you can strengthen. The key is to use this as a foundation to build on. The first stage of any work, then, must be to identify the approaches parents use currently and the techniques they have adopted that can be maintained.
This audit is about examining the reality of parents’ day-to-day methods. You might begin your interviews by asking whether there are house rules, whether those rules are actually written down anywhere and, if not, how everyone knows about them. You might find real clarity here, a complete lack of rules, or differences of opinion among household members about expectations of each other.
I find there is sometimes a tendency to try and impose lots of rules, but this is likely to be counterproductive: an excess of rules will obscure what is really important, making it harder for children to know what is expected of them. It may also prompt parents to frequently reprimand children, which is not effective.
This stage is also the opportunity to learn when and how parents spend quality time with their children; the ways parents praise and encourage them; rewards they use, if any; and how they respond to misbehaviour, including their use of consequences.
(2) Check:
The next stage is to check with parents that you have accurately interpreted and recorded parents’ approach during the audit. This should take place some time later, once you have been able to look back on your notes.
It is also an opportunity to share your hypotheses about what might be happening in the house between parents and the children, and what may be contributing to any identified difficulties at home.
I would seek parents’ permission before sharing your hypothesis and be prepared for them to reject it entirely. But that exchange is likely to improve both of your insights about the dynamics at home and how to make progress. You can then refine your hypothesis.
(3) Agree:
To be able to move forward, you must reach some sort of agreement about strengths and areas where parents would like greater support or a tailored intervention.
Any work attempted without this sort of partnership is doomed to fail from the start and you must be prepared to offer parents the input they want, not just what you think is best.
That does not prevent negotiation, though. You could acknowledge this by recognising that both of you may need to find a compromise so that you, the child’s parents and the court (if relevant) are all satisfied with the work that is undertaken.
Where one of your hypotheses is that there are too many rules in the household for it to be manageable, I have found it helpful to complete an exercise with parents where you present three boxes to them of increasing size:
- The smallest box is for rules that are non-negotiable and must always be followed by everyone in the household. To start with, I would limit this to a maximum of three rules. They might include things like nobody using violence; they are the really important expectations without which the household will not function.
- The middle box is for rules that are negotiable and can involve some flexibility. I would try and put no more than five rules in this category. An example might be bedtimes, where parents accept that there will inevitably be days when children go to bed a little later than is usually agreed. Another example might be swearing where, while parents may want a complete prohibition on the use of profanity, they recognise the reality that lots of people occasionally swear.
- The largest box is for everything else that, in an ideal world, parents would like to be followed at home but concede are not worth fretting about. This exercise requires parents to reach the point where they are willing to not enforce these rules.
(4) Coach:
Coaching is the point of implementation. Remember that throughout this exercise, but especially during coaching, you should be modelling positive parenting by, for example, acknowledging and endorsing the parents’ successes and skills. The principle is that by highlighting and affirming the good, this behaviour is more likely to be repeated, just like when parents praise positive behaviour.
Depending on the child’s situation, parents may be constrained in terms of how much time they can spend with the child and this will evidently impact on how you support them. If they are only seeing their child for a few hours a week in a contact centre, for example, it is not realistic to expect them to spend this time focusing on implementing your guidance.
In all cases, I would suggest that you and the parents find some way of them spending time attending to the child in undirected, uncompetitive play. Here, they should ask few questions and instead focus just on describing what the child is doing, reflecting on their activity, and using labelled praise (eg “I am so pleased to see you concentrating on drawing that tree with your green pen”), rather than general praise, like saying “well done”.
This time, which is central to positive parenting, can initially feel surprisingly unnatural. But it means the child gets attention, validation and affirmation for simply being themselves (rather than attention for misbehaving, in contrast). This is likely to reinforce this behaviour.
Parents usually have excellent ideas about rewards and may already have adopted reward charts, so be sure to acknowledge this. Avoid being too generous with rewards – the last thing you want is for parents to overcommit. Some parents may have tried reward charts previously and found them unhelpful, so do not force them to try again if this appears to be futile.
It is also likely to be important for you to spend some time with parents focusing on their use of consequences.
Parents often feel they have to create and implement punishments, but a more effective strategy is likely to focus on consequences that are natural, logical, and relate to the behaviour in question.
A natural consequence is one that leads on from the behaviour without any intervention, like not being able to go to football training in the morning if you do not wake up early enough. In this example, children will therefore quickly understand that if they do not wake up in time they cannot participate in this activity they enjoy.
Logical consequences are, in contrast, created and implemented by parents, but the advice tends to be to follow the ‘three Rs’ in their construction: they should be related to the behaviour (eg if a child does not shut down their games console when agreed, the next day they are not allowed to play on it); they should be respectful; and they should be reasonable (eg removing the games console for the rest of the year would be a disproportionate response).
(5) Reflect
The final stage is to reflect on how this work has gone, to reinforce the parents’ progress and encourage their ongoing commitment to the plan you have agreed. You may also identify aspects of the work that went less well and discuss how to tackle these issues differently in the future.
If you have a Community Care Inform Children licence, log on to access the full guide and learn more about supporting parents of children in care.
What to read next
- Kinship care: quick guide
- Care planning and review: quick guide
- Assessment of looked-after children and young people: quick guide
References
Department for Education (2023)
Children’s social care: national framework
