Listen to thisGaye Francis was becoming discouraged. As social worker at St Crispin's she had been working very hard with a number of the children's families and – she thought – had made a lot of progress with several of them.. She had a natural, warm manner with the parents, and was quickly liked and trusted by all of them. Gaye had two small children of her own, and she had always felt sympathetic towards parents whose families had gotten into difficulties. “It must be awful", she confided in friends, “to have your children taken away while you try to get your life back together again." Her attitude of “there, but for the grace of God, go I” meant that she was always positive and encouraging with parents, never critical or judgemental. The parents appreciated this, and most often responded well and were willing to work with her.
But several times, when Gaye had parents motivated to work at taking back the responsibility for their children, things started to go badly again. The children were negative, acted out, or seemed unwilling to go along with the game-plan. Weekends at home ended in conflict.
Parents felt inadequate with their children, and often unequal to their demands – not only their material demands, but also their needs for control or discipline. Eleven-year-old Peter just wasn’t interested in going home, and Alan (17) and his dad fought over his coming in at 1 am on Sunday mornings. The twins (eight years old, Toni and Tony!) forever complained of being bored at home. Tracey (14) just wanted to be away from the house all the time, while Ros seemed to expect her mother to wait on her hand and foot. “You warned me that it would be difficult," said one parent to Gaye, “but I find the weekends when my daughter comes home are really high stress and hard work times. I’m ashamed to say that I don’t look forward to them!"
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Evaluation
There are no simple answers here. A problem with our plans for families
(which we think are so obviously right!) is that parents and children
have a strong sense of guilt or failure when the plans don’t come
together, and these feelings make it all the harder for either to try
again. Often we will never get families together again – and often we
realistically shouldn’t even try – but the plans we may make for
children and their families are seldom as good as the relationships
between them which we make possible and facilitate. It is these which
may or may not hatch into new beginnings.
1. Just like a horse, you can take a child to the water, but you can’t make him drink. Children are extraordinarily resilient to difficult conditions at home, but when they finally lose faith in their families it is very hard to restore this. Eleven-year-old Peter, with the wisdom of hard-earned experienced, may have a far more realistic picture of what he can expect at home, and therefore doesn’t share our enthusiasm for our plan to put him back there. We have to ask ourselves the prior question as to whether Peter has really been able to regain trust in anyone, because only after this has happened will we be able to work on re-establishing trust at home. In other words, we may have more work to do before different living arrangements can be expected to succeed.
2. The problem with Alan and his dad is also related to trust. We trust people to play various roles in our lives, and those roles, to be real, are not simply handed over with the custody papers. At 17, Alan is working at important developmental tasks about values, identity, career choices, autonomy, and his approaching young adulthood. Another horse analogy seems to work here: Alan may have been working at these issues in the residential unit with a youth care worker in the role of authority figure, and it can be risky indeed for Alan to change horses in mid-stream. Serious family work would have included the father in this precarious process long before any transfer of responsibility takes place. Before discharging youngsters, we always have to ask: what are they busy working on; with whom; who will take this role over?
3. Toni and Tony, being seven, may have received a lot of attention at the children's home. They would very likely have had access to very good recreational facilities (TV, pool, toys). They would have had activities and outings regularly organised for them, and there would have been care workers with them most of the time. For their working single mother, all this is a hard act to follow. A difficult question for us to ask ourselves here is “did we succeed only in mismatching the twins with the reality of their home, instead of ensuring that we kept them compatible?: Children's programmes often have far greater resources – in terms of money, staff, facilities, transport – than the children's own parents, and all of these resources can distance the children from their homes, rather than assist them to reintegrate with their homes.
4. What Tracey and her parents learn is the very sad truth that when children are removed from home, there are parts of their childhood which they may lose forever. Tracey’s mother is disappointed that her daughter wants to be out of the house all the time, but that is how 14-year-old kids are. Maybe Tracey was ten or eleven when she came into care, maybe even younger, and we cannot offer her or her mother a simplistic “happy family” solution now. Idealised images of living happily ever after are never helpful at these times of transition back to the reality. Tracey’s elevens, twelves and thirteens are gone. She has moved on now to a very different place in her life. They last worked together in Chapter 10 of her life story, and everyone needs to know that it is going to be hard for both mother and daughter to pick up the threads in Chapter 14.
5. Perhaps Ros is an example of an area where children's institutions can be least effective in sound family work. In our quest for nutritious meals, hygienic kitchens and bathrooms, attractive surroundings and smooth, efficient organisation, we introduce a whole level of human resource quite unknown to the families we work with – household staff. Can it be that every time we appoint a cook, a cleaner or a gardener, we cut off one of the children's hands; that every time we employ a driver or a fetcher-and-carrier, we cut off a foot? When we then try to reintegrate into a family a youngster who cannot wash or iron, who cannot contribute to the cooking and cleaning, or help with shopping and paying bills, we overload that already vulnerable family. In terms of domestic attitudes and skills, instead of adding a functional contributor to enhance the family, we add a new burden.
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Gaye Francis mustn’t despair. She is doing well. She obviously has good
skills with parents and encourages them in the right direction. But
reintegrating families doesn’t come about only through working with the
parents; what happens inside the residential programme can make or break
any attempts at rebuilding families, and the planning must also be
genuinely committed to the match.
