Dynamics of professional parental status disclosure in child protection work

ABSTRACT

The topic of professional self-disclosure has been subject to uneven levels of attention in the social work literature. Although many writers and researchers have addressed the topic in the context of clinical social work, there has been limited dedicated attention to its use and role in routine practice in child protection and child welfare settings. This article is concerned with a specific type of self-disclosure: what social workers say to the parents they work with about whether they themselves are parents or not. Drawing on interview material from a research study concerned with how children’s services professionals experience the suffering of parents, it explores the psycho-social dynamics of social workers investing in different positions about making or refusing to make disclosures about their parental status. This allows for differentiated insight into the contexts that surround parental status disclosure and highlights how decision making around whether and what to disclose can be led more by anxieties and concerns about the maintenance of a particular professional identity than deliberation about potential benefits to parents and the working relationship.

KEYWORDS:

• Child protection work
• parent-worker relationships
• professional self-disclosure
• psychoanalytically informed methods

Acknowledgments

Thanks are due to all the participants for the time they took to share their views and experiences; to Harry Ferguson and David Murphy who supervised the research; and to Jennelle Clarke, Amal Treacher Kabesh, Julie Fox and Jonathan Archard who provided feedback on earlier versions of the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. As Holt and Kelly (2016) point out, it is no longer just that the interests of the child are seen as needing to be at the centre of decision making, but that parents have become ‘only of interest in terms of what their actions and inactions contribute to children and not service users in their own right’ (p. 160). They note how in the re-drafting of the Working Together guidance in 2015 (Department for Education, 2015), parents figure solely as part of an acknowledgement that failures to safeguard children often arise in the context of adult needs being placed before children’s needs.

2. Ethical approval for the research was sought and obtained via the University of Nottingham School of Sociology and Social Policy ethics review process. The study was also approved by senior managers in both of the local authorities involved. Informed consent was obtained from all participants prior to interviews. I advised all participants of the sensitivity of the subject matter, and the active nature of consent to participate (see Hingley-Jones, 2016, p. 122) was acknowledged by reminding participants at different stages (for example, the beginning of follow-up interviews) that their participation was entirely voluntary and they had an absolute right to withdraw from the study at any time. In this article, as with the doctoral thesis from which is drawn, I have used pseudonyms for individual participants and have changed some identifying characteristics. In making such changes, the implications for the integrity of the data, and specifically, how altering particular characteristics might alter the meaning of what was said or how it is interpreted, have been considered. Drafts developed from the data were subject to feedback from my doctoral supervisors and read and commented on by two colleagues (one, a researcher in the field of health and social care and the other a social work practitioner).

3. In Kleinian theory, configurations between the self and object (crudely, the idea one has of someone or something to which one has an emotional connection) and unconscious defences against anxiety are conceptualised in terms of, what are termed, paranoid-schizoid and depressive ‘positions’. These positions are characteristic of the functioning of the infant’s mind in relationship to the caregiver but returned to throughout life. Simply stated, the paranoid-schizoid position is a more omnipotent position, one of resort in the face of perceived threat, and based, at a fundamental level, on the splitting of objects into good and bad. As Hollway and Jefferson describe it, it is ‘a position to which we may all resort in the face of self-threatening occurrences because it permits us to believe in a good object, on which we can rely, uncontaminated by bad threats, which have been split off and located elsewhere’ (Hollway & Jefferson, 2013, p. 18). Conversely, the depressive position involves relating to the object in a way that acknowledges a mixture of good and bad coexisting within it. Whereas in the paranoid schizoid position the mother is ‘split’ in the infant’s mind into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ caregivers, one satisfying and the other frustrating him or her, in the depressive position, the infant conceives of the mother as a whole person, both fulfiling and frustrating their needs. The depressive position also captures, in this sense, the infant’s achievement of the experience of guilt and anguish over attacking the mother and damaging external and internal objects. In the form of ‘depressive position functioning’ it can be read as an individual’s capacity to keep in mind a vision of her or himself and the other as separate beings and as illustrating the emergence of moral consideration.

Additional information

Funding

Economic and Social Research Council studentship [Ref: 1013476].

Notes on contributors

Philip John Archard

Philip John Archard recently completed his PhD in social work at the School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Nottingham. He currently works as a mental health practitioner in child and adolescent mental health services. [email: [email protected]]