CHILD WELFARE STUDENT'S VIEW / Part 395 / For Love and For Justice / Zabeth and Paul Bayne

On November 22nd, Alison wrote a comment on the blog post #375 entitled, A Social Worker's Challenge. There she introduced herself. Following from that on November 27^th, Ray Ferris responded to Alison.There were a few others who engaged her that day on Blog #380. Since then for the past several days she and others have continued to interact.

Alison

Alison told us that she is a mother and that she is a fourth year student with a child welfare specialization at University of the Fraser Valley in Abbotsford. She happened upon my blog while researching CAPP and Risk Assessment for her class work. She left her informative comment after browsing and reading blog content for an hour. She has chosen child protection as her career track. She knows this is not easy work but she believes that it is honourable work. Very openly and honestly she spoke of her own ethical concerns about aspects of the work in which she will be engaged. She told us that she has received good counsel from her father who is himself a social worker with MCFD with a twenty year service record. She knows that there is a high attrition rate among social workers. Child protection certainly has a high attrition rate as attested by a social worker who as a guest instructor in one of Alison's recent classes stated that she has chosen to move to another province because of disappointment with Ministry changes over the past few years. When speaking of the challenges of the work in which she will be employed, Alison wrote, “There are no black and white cases, they are all painted in shades of gray. However, I chose this work because I believe that someone has to stand for children. I think that, sometimes, standing for children means standing for their parents, supporting their parents, developing their parents. (After all, what is the full name of MCFD? The Ministry for children and family DEVELOPMENT.)”

She thanked me for acknowledging the complexities of the process for keeping children safe in that day's blog entitled 'A Social Worker's Challenge' and then she said, “I will endeavour to live up to the challenge you describe in this post, to be willing to admit when I have made the wrong decision. I think I'm not the only social worker out there willing to take up this challenge...”

I believed hers was a significant comment and because I wanted people with a jaded impression of all social workers to be encouraged, I invited Alison to write to me personally and she did that. I asked for and received her permission to write this information as a blog post. In that exchange she wrote, “It is difficult to not be discouraged after reading some of the comments placed on your blog, it seems that many people lump social workers and child protection workers and politicians and MCFD into one category. I personally see many competent child protection workers, some of whom are trained as social workers, some of whom are not, and I see a few poor practitioners. I also see that many good workers are constrained by the ministry, by their managers (who are no longer protected by a union, and can be fired for not following the 'party line'), and forced to do things they don't want to do.”

Tomorrow I will publish another post that features Alison's thoughts. She represents people who are our best hope for family development within MCFD and responsible child welfare.

She writes a blog called random musings...

SWs LEARNING FROM MISTAKES / Part 364 / For Love and For Justice / Zabeth and Paul Bayne

Eileen Munro wrote a 2006 volume called "Effective Child Protection.”

One of her most poignant lines quoted from page 141 is, "The single most important factor in minimizing errors is to admit that you may be wrong." This is fundamental to turning MCFD around. I explore that premise today.

Among the hard realities of child protective work is that we do not live in a perfect world and there are no perfect parents. Good parents sometimes make mistakes. All parents may not meet the arbitrary standards that a social worker has developed as a model. These parents can nonetheless function capably as loving caregivers and have a right to do so. They might benefit from services offered with no attached strings and provisos. Another hard reality is that child protection workers do make mistakes, yet if there is a willingness the same workers can learn from those mistakes and improvements can be made to practice. Reluctance to learn informs superiors that these workers may not be made of the right stuff for this work.

We would begin to minimize the mistakes that are being made in child protection if we employed the right people. Hiring and retaining the right people for child protection in British Columbia is a difficult science. I don't believe that the Ministry of Children and Family Development has yet mastered it. It's easy to be critical and I must sound like that often. If employing the right people for child protection is a priority for us, then what must be understood at the top of the stuctural chart is that there has to be a balance between acquiring people with an academic ability to meet the job demands and the emotional intelligence to work with families, colleagues and other professionals.

Did you catch that? Emotional intelligence is not to be shunned but valued. Child protection is not merely an academic exercise whereby one follows the letter of the law. This is human welfare with which we are dealing. These parents are fellow humans of the same stuff as you are social workers, and these parents are not antagonists by nature. Their adversarial buttons have been pushed sometimes by the mistaken actions of social workers who have failed to, or been unable to use emotional intelligence.

“The skills and knowledge Eileen Munro thinks are needed to do the job properly include:

• using comprehensive and rational frameworks to make decisions
• using both current and historical information in relation to making judgements about families
• being prepared to change their beliefs about a family based on new information i.e. not clinging to old beliefs whilst ignoring new information
• workers testing their hypothesis about a particular judgement.
• having a critical approach to the work they are undertaking
• refraining from letting first impressions of the family shape case direction
  

These skills should be the common framework or language between the team leader and worker. A common ground that is used to measure and monitor what is happening in a family.”
“Mistakes will continue to be made in the helping professions. Child Protection is not immune from this. The challenge is to be proactive in developing systems that enable practitioner's to make the best decisions possible. Where mistakes are made, it is important that processes are put in place to salvage whatever lessons are possible.”

(This post inspired by the Child Protection and Youth Justice Professional Development Unit of State Government of Victoria, Australia, Department of Human Services)