Editorial

This edition of Child Care in Practice continues the Journal’s proud tradition and track-record of presenting international, empirical research, exploring the multi-faceted issues related to child care and associated settings. Like previous editions, in this issue we present papers spanning many jurisdictions, methodologies and research topics. Empirical studies from Serbia, the Republic of Ireland, the United Kingdom, and Norway alongside theoretical contributions from Northern Ireland and the United States are all presented and provide key contributions to the knowledge base. In this edition, the concepts of participation and voice are particularly pronounced, and many of our papers discuss the importance of these factors in respect of policy and practice development. This edition also provides explorations of underpinning theory and highlights the importance of interdisciplinarity—a central focus of this journal.

In our first paper, Hillman et al. (2021) in their study examining foster carer’s experiences of the assessment and feedback process in the UK, sought the views of 42 foster carers via an online quantitative survey. Further qualitative insights were gathered via six telephone interviews. The study highlights the importance of assessment in the placement of children in care and highlights the important role that foster carers play in such assessments. The study examines the experiences of foster carers linked with the organisation, Five Rivers Foster Care, and specifically their experiences of the completion of assessment measures and subsequent feedback process related to the children placed in their care.

The study shows that some foster carers felt the assessments that they were required to complete lacked relevance to their particular child; others expressed a wish to have a more active role in the assessment process; while others wished to have further knowledge of the process of assessment itself. The study highlights issues regarding communication and involvement with data showing that few carers knew what happened with the assessments they completed. Carers expressed the need for practical supports, such as filling out the forms and the paper also found that the process of conducting the assessments provided an opportunity to foster carers to reflect on the placement they were facilitating. Overall, the paper highlights the importance of participation in creating a wider sense of feeling heard, supported, and motivated.

Following on the theme of foster carer’s participation, the next paper in this edition by Lotty et al. (2021), presents a qualitative study of foster carers’ needs in respect of the foster placements they facilitate but, more specifically, needs related to the issue of trauma. As highlighted by the authors, trauma is an issue that can be overly represented in foster placements. Data were collected in this study via a series of focus groups with foster carers, facilitators, and multi-disciplinary practitioners and clinicians in Ireland. Participants were asked what they felt were the challenges when working with children in care but also whether they felt trauma informed interventions might help and what such interventions might look like.

Foster carers identified feeling ill-equipped to help the children in their care at times, while facilitators and practitioners spoke about this factor in the context of an under resourced and “crisis led service”. Lotty et al’s study highlights that practitioners, clinicians, and foster carers alike, signalled a need for some form of trauma-informed training. The paper highlights what the authors see as a current gap in social work knowledge, and an absence of a systemic strategy for implementing trauma-informed care in the Irish child welfare system.

The concept of participation, raised in the paper by Hillman et al. (2021) is continued in this edition’s next contribution, by McCafferty (2021). Staying in the area of child welfare and protection, McCaffery presents a dichotomy in the social work practice of listening to the voice of the child; a dichotomy between a suggested ambivalence towards participation rights, despite a body of research which supports the efficacy and importance of such rights. McCaffery charts the growth in the narrative of “participation” in social work in the UK in recent years, stemming from independent enquiries and reviews of child protection practice, and draws on the literature to explore the barriers to participation. The central contribution of the paper is the use of Honneth’s Recognition Theory to help practitioners deliberate more reflexively about the participation rights of children.

The paper outlines the tenets of Honneth’s theory, self-confidence, self-respect, and self-esteem and by using examples from child protection practice, examines these tenets via interactions at individual, State, and Civil-Society level. In the context of participation, the paper emphasises the child as agent, and presents practical guidance to help social workers think creatively and reflexively about participation.

In highlighting the many barriers to child participation, McCafferty (2021) presented the context of children with disabilities as a cohort who may face particular challenges. This theme of participation concludes in our fourth paper of the edition by Slavković et al. (2021), where the specific issue of participation by children with disabilities is explored. The study, conducted in Serbia, examines differences in the frequency of participation across various settings between children with disabilities and, those identified as typically developing children. The settings examined are home, preschool, and community and the study gathered data via a survey of 203 parents.

This paper presents that significant differences in levels of participation are to be found. The authors highlight that children with disabilities experience significant disadvantage including lower social support, education quality, activity intensity and activity enjoyment. Of note however, they found no statistically significant difference in levels of participation in home settings. The authors hypothesise that the warmth of familial relationships, irrespective of the child’s ability, as being a significant supportive factor in this respect enabling children to integrate and participate more easily. The authors warn that while participation levels are modifiable, the increasing demands on children associated with age, may pose additional challenges and barriers to participation.

The issue of bullying is the focus of our fifth paper, which presents the complex issues of defining, recognising and working with bullying within a pre-school context. The title used by the authors (Kovač & Cameron, 2021) aptly highlights this complexity, “Are we talking about the same thing.” The study collected survey data from 694 preschool employees about their attitudes and beliefs related to the phenomenon of preschool bullying. The paper begins with an important airing of the degree of hesitation among professionals regarding the use of the term bullying when referring to preschool children. The authors highlight some potential reasons for this hesitation, being notions of intentionality and aggression, norms related to developmental and social abilities of preschool children, and the degree of understanding of the issue by adults, education professionals, and children themselves. The authors correctly describe the study as exploratory, and begin with a fundamental question of “do employees believe bullying occurs in preschool”?

The paper presents that, across various data points, there was wide agreement that bullying was indeed viewed as a phenomenon occurring with the preschool context and that it also is a feature within the youngest cohorts of children. Differing slightly from wider recognised definitions of bullying, the study found that, for their participants, an act did not need to be on purpose to constitute bullying and also could be confined to once incident as opposed to a regular or consistent pattern of behaviour. Ultimately, the paper found “overwhelming agreement among participants that use of the term bullying in preschool is meaningful and that practitioners believe that bullying occurs among young children in this context.”

Our sixth paper speaks directly to the central ethos of our Child Care in Practice Journal as a space for interdisciplinary dissemination and communication. This paper takes us into the realm of theoretical underpinnings and understandings and their impact on interdisciplinary communication and practices. The paper proposes from the outset that as theoretical understandings continue to develop and diversify, there is a risk that the important common ground in the behavioural sciences could be lost.

Woodland et al. (2021) use Bronfrenbrenner’s (1979) ecological and Person-Process-Context-Time model to demonstrate how three specific therapeutic modalities can be mapped onto such a model; namely multisystemic therapy, outdoor behavioural therapy, and paediatric-integrated primary care. The paper provides specific recommendations for clinicians in how the various levels of the ecological system can help us consider issues that may be impacting upon clients, from the micro to the macro.

The penultimate paper in this edition of Child Care in Practice considers this ecological system in action. This paper, by Mirković et al. (2021), examines the differences between youth who seek support from their parents and those who seek additional support, both from parent and from a non-parental adult. The paper presents a secondary analysis of Growing Up in Ireland longitudinal study data. The authors highlight the importance of both adult and peer support for different aspects of youths’ wellbeing and draw on the existing literature, including various theoretical frames, to demonstrate that closer bonds in these contexts are recognised as having beneficial outcomes for youth. In doing so the paper also highlights the dearth of research exploring the relationships between young people an other adults and provides an important contribution in this space.

The sample drawn from the Growing Up in Ireland study includes data from 6,216 young people aged 17/18 and shows that these supportive relationships with non-parental adults are present across genders. While across household-types, those young people from single-parent families may be more likely to seek this additional support form a non-parental adult. The authors highlight the importance of social capital and building supportive bonds within the young person’s ecological system and social network.

Our final paper in this edition of Child Care in Practice, by Augusti and Myhre (2021), examines the complex issue of disclosure of sexual and physical abuse by children. The study, conducted in Norway, adds to the understanding of children’s disclosures processes prior to meeting with professionals at the Norwegian Barnahus service. The authors set out the intricacies regarding the disclosure of abuse including the well-documented barriers to disclosure. The study gathered the views of 12 young people via semi-structured qualitative interviews.

The authors’ central contribution is the interesting concept of the “domino effect” of disclosure for children at this age. They explain the domino effect as “a sequential pattern of disclosures often initiated with a disclosure to a friend or relative, and then gradually disclosures were made to parents, health professionals, the police, and sometimes child protection services” (Augusti & Myhre, 2021). Of specific interest to the readership of this journal, the paper presents children’s experiences of their interactions with various child care professionals and the authors, whilst acknowledging the small sample, note some key implications for practice supported by the wider research in this field. The importance of asking, the provision of supports, and ensuring children are provided with sufficient information and communication are all highlighted as key concerns.

The range of papers presented in this edition of Child Care in Practice journal highlights the ever-important need for robust, evidenced, and ethically sound research into the various aspects of children’s lives; from their day-to-day interactions with their environments and communities, to their development from early years to older adolescence. The importance of participation and children’s voices within and across this research landscape is to the fore in this edition but is a feature that continues to require attention and inclusion. Child Care in Practice continues to strive to present such scholarship and we hope you enjoy this new issue of the Journal.