Children's Agency, Children's Welfare: A Dialogical Approach to Child Development, Policy and Practice

167 Pages·2010·1.66 MB·English

by  Carolus Van Nijnatten

Children's ageNCy,
Children's welfare
A dialogical approach to child development, policy and practice
Carolus van Nijnatten
CHILDREN’S AGENCY,
CHILDREN’S WELFARE
For Anneke
CHILDREN’S AGENCY,
CHILDREN’S WELFARE
A dialogical approach to child
development, policy and practice
Carolus van Nijnatten
First published in Great Britain in 2010 by
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ISBN 978 1 84742 489 1 hardcover
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Contents
About the author vi
Introduction 1
one Child, welfare, agency 5
two The development of individual agency 17
three Social interaction and interactive agency 33
four Social agency and social context 51
five Diagnosis and dialogue 71
six Change and co-construction 89
seven Dialogical management 113
eight Dialogical child welfare: conclusion 131
References 137
Appendix: Transcript conventions and abbreviations 153
Index 155
v
Children’s agency, children’s welfare
About the author
Carolus van Nijnatten was educated as a developmental psychologist at Utrecht
University. For some years he worked at a child welfare agency in Amsterdam and
Utrecht before returning to his former university at the end of the 1970s. In 1986
he finished his PhD thesis ‘Mother Justice and her children:the development of the
psycho-juridical complex in child welfare’, which was also published in Germany
as Die Wahrheitsmaschine (Forum Verlag Godesberg, 1991). From 2004 to 2009 he
was Professor of Social Work at Radboud University, Nijmegen. Currently, he is
Professor of Social Studies in Child Welfare at Utrecht University.
Several of his books have been published in Dutch about psychodynamic
development, children’s rights, case management in child welfare, authority and
development, and children of detained parents. The latter was the subject of the
book Detention and development: Perspectives of children of prisoners (Forum Verlag
Godesberg, 1998). Articles by Carolus van Nijnatten have been published in
American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, British Journal of Social Work, Journal of Social
Work Practice and Research on Language and Social Interaction, among others. He is a
member of the DANASWAC network of researchers in discourses and narratives
in social work and counselling.
Carolus is the foster father of two grown-up children and lives with his partner.
vi
Introduction
A child’s need for stories is as fundamental as his need for food.
Paul Auster
Child welfare is about agency, or rather about children and families lacking
adequate agency. Child welfare gets involved when children and families manifestly
have serious trouble in organising their lives. As a child born of an already
widowed mother who was taken into hospital on several occasions throughout
my childhood, I was always aware of how vulnerable children are and how easily
they can find themselves at risk. Since childhood, I have been fascinated by
the vulnerability of children. When I first became a student of developmental
psychology, I was already sure that my main field of study would be child welfare.
I have since been involved in child welfare in various ways – as a reformer of
the child welfare establishment in the 1970s, as a researcher in the field of child
welfare discourse and communication, as a voluntary family guardian, and for
almost 25 years as a member of the board of a child welfare agency. However,
the most intense experience has been as the foster father of two children. It was
from them that I learned what any parent may learn from, and tries to teach,
their children: how to live one’s life. For them, it was a long and difficult path
to adulthood, but they demonstrated that their will to survive was stronger than
the horrors they had had to endure. They also showed how hard it is to survive
and to overcome the very child welfare bureaucracy that is trying to help them.
Together we endured the idiocies of the system; we saw decent, hard-working
social workers suffer ‘burn-out’ and we were astonished by the unshakeable,
reigning belief in formal procedures. The best help we received was when child
welfare workers did not follow the official tramlines and when we were allowed
to tell our own stories.
Child welfare gets involved when parents and children are seriously at risk
of losing all agency, when their behaviour signals that they lack the power to
keep their lives on an even keel. For whatever reason, these people have been
unable to develop the psychological means necessary to structure their lives in a
complex society. Child welfare families are characterised by an accumulation of
problems associated with health, work, child rearing, housing and relationships. It
is an accumulation of risk factors rather than individual determinants that leads
to behavioural problems.
Since the end of the 19th century, legal changes have made it possible in most
western countries for the state to intervene coercively in family situations. The
number of families confronted with such coercive intervention changes over time.
In the Netherlands, between 1960 and 1980, there was a steady decrease in the
number of child welfare interventions, but ever since, there have been a growing
number of families with mandated care. Are these figures proof of declining
1
Children’s agency, children’s welfare
agency among children and families or do they indicate a more repressive child
welfare discourse in which the agency of children and families is questioned
more than previously?
However, child welfare is also about professional agency. Over recent decades,
in the Netherlands and in other European countries, professional agency has
come under pressure, and has found itself under the spotlight of serious criticism.
In the Netherlands, a series of fatal family dramas raised doubts about the
functioning of public services. But what was remarkable about most of these
tragic cases was that they provoked a general dissatisfaction with child welfare
rather than condemnation of the parents or a debate on the growing difficulties
that families have to face in modern, complex society. Today, little seems to be left
of the professional status that social work used to enjoy in the decades following
the Second World War. The profession is under fire, criticised both for its poor
theoretical underpinning and for its lack of professional discipline, while behind
these developments lies a decline of professional agency in a child welfare system
that has increasingly become dominated by the discourse of management.
Children’s and parents’ agency and child welfare agency are interrelated. When
civil agency becomes dysfunctional, professional agency becomes available;
inadequate family agency can wind up with the intervention of a child welfare
agency. Both family agency and professional agency are of an organisational nature,
which enables human beings to structure their life and that of others. Agency is a
complex matter, a human attribute displayed in individual development, in human
interaction and social structure. In this book, the dynamics of child (development),
welfare and agency will be analysed in the various different contexts in which
they appear. For child development, this is the context of parenting and family life;
for professional child welfare, it is the intermediate position between families at
risk, professional affiliation and child welfare management; and for child welfare
agencies, it is the context of political rule, citizens and institutional agencies.
A characteristic shared by both family agency and professional agency is the
defensive reaction evoked whenever their quality is subjected to scrutiny. Child
welfare workers know from experience that clients are on the defensive as soon
as their parental capabilities and responsibilities are questioned. All too often,
parents react by showering the child welfare worker with proof of their parental
competence. They harden their positions and react suspiciously to any suggestions
for improving the situation. One of child welfare workers’ most important tasks
is to encourage an exchange of information and meanings, but this defensive
parental reaction can get in the way of an open dialogue with professional helpers.
One sees a similar defensive reaction on the part of child welfare workers when
their own professional capabilities are raised as a subject for discussion. Mostly, they
react by producing evidence of the high standard of their work, their satisfactory
‘productivity’ and the quality of the ‘product’. ‘Evidence-based child welfare’
has become a slogan standing for reliability, effectiveness and professionalism. It
goes without saying that rigorous evaluation of intervention programmes is a
welcome support for child welfare, but the term ‘evidence-based’ is often used
2
Introduction
as a synonym for randomised controlled designs. The dominance of this type of
evidence downgrades other kinds of research and certainly excludes professional
experience as a relevant source of knowledge. In child welfare, randomised control
is practically very hard to achieve. More significantly, it can only produce insight
into general regularities rather than an understanding of the individual client
who needs help. The dominance of this evidence-based approach, because it is
concerned with determining standards rather than supporting an open dialogue
with clients and colleagues about the need for change and how to achieve it,
may also in the long run be counterproductive. A major task of child welfare
managers is to try to organise a meaningful exchange of information and meanings
between professionals. ‘Evidence-based’ is not the professionals’ way of advancing
or evaluating their own work; it is rather the way policy and client organisations
demand that child welfare workers demonstrate the relevance of their work. This
has put child welfare workers on the defensive.
This book is in the first instance addressed to those professionals in child welfare
who think their agency is under threat, and who are convinced of the relevance of
their work without it being demonstrable by means of randomised clinical trials. I
hope to provide them with different modes of justification. Under pressure from
modern management styles, one often hears child welfare workers nowadays say
they have lost all inspiration and complain that their profession is close to losing
its heart. Others suffer burn-out as they persist in a fruitless search for a balance
between the demands of clients and the demands of managers, only to conclude
that they cannot meet incompatible sets of expectations. There is a widespread loss
of the professional self-esteem that used to enable them to accept the imperfect
nature of child welfare work. With this book, I hope to give new inspiration to
these professionals. To make my argument more concrete, I will introduce Jennifer.
She looks much like a child welfare client I got to know. Although her story is
fictitious because it involves experiences of other child welfare clients, the image
that is presented of her is realistic enough.
Child welfare is a complex of relationships, institutions and agencies that needs
a psycho-societal approach. It is a multifaceted institution that engages with
individual development, human interaction, professional and policy interests and
changing societal contexts. These different dimensions of human experience – and
the ways in which they intersect – need to be studied in relation to each other. In
that sense, one also hopes through this book to contribute to the development of
a social scientific perspective on the relationship between individual and society
mediated by professional institutions.
My main contribution will be to rehabilitate dialogue as a major instrument of
organisation, at the individual, relational and institutional level. Talking was once
at the heart of the social work profession. Now it has hardly a serious place in the
protocols of standardisation; it cannot satisfy the demands of managers and clients
for proof of quality in quantitative, measurable terms. The rehabilitation of dialogue
means recognising the clinical nature of child welfare. I hope to make clear that
the quality of child welfare problems lies in the realm of narrative and is dialogical.
3