Child & Family Social Work最新文献

Kinship care is increasingly recognised as an important care option within the Australian out-of-home care (OOHC) system. However, kinship carers face multifaceted challenges that set them apart from other carers within the system and internationally. Through the lens of kinship carer advocates, this research explores factors that contribute to placement stability in kinship care. Advocates offer a unique perspective on the interface between the child protection system and the carers that has not been explored before. Semistructured interviews were conducted with 10 South Australian kinship carer advocates to gain insights into their perspectives. Findings of this research highlight the need to recognise kinship care as a unique alternative within OOHC, engaging with three overarching themes: stability in an ecological system of care, bridging support gaps to achieve placement stability, and recognising instability in kinship care. In the context of these three themes, advocates emphasised priority to implement trauma-informed, whole of family support frameworks to further promote stability within kinship placements. However, the concept of stability, often framed as uninterrupted continuity of care arrangement, came under examination and scrutiny in light of these research findings, encouraging further research in this area.

Research on children's experiences of parental separation highlights equality and fairness between parents as one explanation for why children wish for symmetrical time-sharing between parents. In this paper, we analyse adolescents' narratives and ask how adolescents negotiate closeness and distance with their parents, with a specific emphasis on issues of loyalty when adolescents' views diverge from symmetry and fairness. Narratives from qualitative interviews with 11 Norwegian adolescents aged between 12 and 17 were analysed. Ideas from the theory of invisible loyalties were applied to analyse the interviews, resulting in two topics, namely, ‘Bookkeeping of parents’ fulfilled and failed obligations’ and ‘Negotiations of obligations between parents and adolescents’. According to the adolescents in this study, fairness does not necessarily mean equal time-sharing. Fairness is subject to negotiation, and adolescents' loyalty to parents is justified by fulfilled and failed obligations.

Three tendencies currently influence social workers' questioning practices at statutory meetings with children in out-of-home care: an awareness that the children may have unmet needs that social workers should detect and react upon the introduction of screening instruments to social work and changes in questioning practices due to a quest for greater child participation. This project explores children's preferences about social workers' questioning practices given these trends. A total of 18 Danish children aged 10–13 participated in three separate panels in 2020 and 2021. Each panel met up on three Saturday afternoons to discuss and offer opinions on subjects that included social workers' questioning practices with or without the use of screening questionnaires. According to the children, social workers need to reach a better balance between children's right to privacy and their need for help. They want fewer people ‘meddling in their lives’, more privacy and to be questioned only when social workers can act very concretely to help them solve a problem. Children's preferences indicate that we should adjust social work questioning practices with children placed in out-of-home care in general and our use of screening instruments in social work in particular.

Adoptive parenting is a lifelong process. Adoptive parents face unique challenges at different stages of parenting, which require proper recognition, specialised support and sustained services. However, social stigma against infertility and adoption in Asian societies, including Hong Kong, has rendered the lived experiences of adoptive parents almost invisible. To address this knowledge gap, the current qualitative study drew on in-depth interviews with 23 Chinese parents from 14 families (including nine couples, three wives, one single mother and one divorced mother) with school-age adoptees aged 6–17. Adopting a biographical approach, we collected their experiences from their adoption decision to their current stage of parenting. Their narratives revealed that Chinese adoptive parents in Hong Kong, despite their resourcefulness and commitment, encounter challenges throughout the adoption process, including family misunderstandings, lack of adoption leave, struggles related to discipline, difficulties with adoptees with special learning needs and the prevalence of cultural devaluation. Our findings contribute to and have implications for research and adoption services and policies.

Child safety is an important outcome of child protection services (CPSs); however, this is often assessed in terms of official registries (e.g., rereports). Little empirical evidence is available about how the frequency of child maltreatment changes during CPS intervention by using self-report measures. The present study evaluates the frequency of child maltreatment experienced by children receiving mandatory child protection support compared to carefully matched children receiving voluntary child protection support. The current study is part of an ongoing Dutch longitudinal study on family violence consisting of several cohorts with similar designs. Both parents and children reported on the frequency of child maltreatment using validated questionnaires at two timepoints, 12 months apart. To facilitate careful comparison, both groups were matched using propensity scores based on background variables, resulting in two groups of N = 178 children. GLMM analyses showed a significant decrease in the mean number of child maltreatment incidents over time in the total group. However, this decrease did not differ for children receiving mandatory and voluntary child protection support. The findings indicate that, despite possible motivational challenges in the mandatory group, mandatory child protection support elicits comparable results as voluntary support. Implications for further research and practice are discussed.

In this study, I investigated the correlations between retrospectively reported experiences of child abuse in the family-of-origin and exposure to community violence as adults on parental monitoring among Palestinian–Israeli parents. A sample of 760 parents (453 mothers, 59.6%) participated in the study. A self-administered questionnaire was used. Results showed that both experiencing child abuse and community violence victimization were associated with high levels of parental stress, and experiencing child abuse was also associated with low levels of parental monitoring. Indirect effects of parental stress were found between both types of violence exposure and parental monitoring. Among mothers, there were additional indirect effects between violence exposure and parental monitoring. These findings suggest that exposure to multiple contexts of violence correlated with parental behaviours, and parenting programmes should focus on reducing parental stress and improving parental monitoring, considering the gender differences. Overall, this study highlights the importance of addressing the outcomes of trauma on parenting monitoring, which can have significant implications for public health.