Introduction

Abstract

Work with children can be the most challenging but also the most rewarding part of the child and family social worker’s role. It includes the face-to-face work when social workers are alongside children, listening to them express their ideas and feelings, finding ways of communicating with them that are appropriate and respectful, and fully involving them when decisions need to be made that affect them. It draws on the capacity to listen without being overwhelmed and to offer a relationship to a child who may be both vulnerable yet hostile or suspicious. It may involve observing a baby about whom there are concerns, using play materials with a disabled pre-school child, doing life-story work with a child in foster care or counselling a pregnant teenager. Such work can undoubtedly be extremely demanding of the social worker’s personal and professional resources. It requires knowledge, skills and an agency context that can support it. Although there are many ways in which the social worker appropriately works for or on behalf of the child, these will not be the main focus of this book. We plan, instead, to focus on the wide-ranging potential for work with the child. Our starting point must be the principle that, as Lady Justice Elizabeth Butler-Sloss put it, children must be treated as ‘persons’ and not as ‘objects of concern’ (HMSQ, 1988).