What do you Think about Parenting? Challenges to Cohesiveness in Child Protection Teams

Abstract

Child protection work requires professionals to manage the different perspectives regarding intervention aims and strategies associated with different personal, academic and organisational backgrounds. Parenting assessment is a determinant task for intervention and for children's future where universal or automatic criteria remain unavailable. This study aimed to explore and characterise the existing agreement (and disagreement) between child protection workers on statements related to judgements on parenting. A total of 325 Portuguese social workers participated in the study, mostly with a background in social work and psychology and more than six years of experience in child protection. Professionals were required to distribute 50 sentences in a scoring sheet (Q-sort methodology) with 11 points. The results were interpreted through the matrix of operationalisation of minimally adequate parenting. Three main answer strands revealed different focuses in sorts' configurations: the child, the procedures and the child's ecology. The clear difference between the factors could contribute to maintaining the child protection system as an adversarial one, and not as an effectively cooperative system. To promote team cohesiveness and intervention success, and to reinforce professionals' wellbeing and resilience, metacommunication on parenting assessment criteria is proposed as a determinant strategy.