Conducting the Home Visit in Child Protection


Book Description

This pocketbook will be a valuable tool for both qualified professionals and students. Focusing on how to conduct a home visit in child protection, this book provides useful advice including examples of good and bad practice, diagrams and flowcharts illustrating processes and quick links to the law.




Conducting the Home Visit in Child Protection


Book Description

FIVE STAR AMAZON REVIEWS for the first edition: “Every community practitioner caring for children and families should carry this book with them.” “As a team manager for a social work team, I think this is a great book that I will use with unqualified, student and newly qualified social workers who are undertaking ALL home visits… Overall, a great resource that I predict will become my new bible.” Conducting a home visit is a fundamental part of a social worker's role, but in practical terms many key issues are overlooked during social work training. This is a practical guide to conducting home visits, a task which many newly qualified social workers can feel unprepared for and which can be fraught with difficulties. Useful features of this book include: • Real case examples based on practitioner’s experiences • Realistic solutions to the everyday difficulties you might face • Examples of what to say • Reference to the latest guidance, including Working Together to Safeguard Children (2013) to ensure you are practicing in line with statutory requirements and expectations. • Guidance and support in understanding lessons learned recent child protection SCRs Written by an experienced social worker and expert in child protection, this book is clear, straightforward and jargon-free. It will be a useful aid to any professionals required to do home visiting. The book addresses: • What you need to do to prepare for the visit • How to get in the door • What to do when you are in the home • What you need to look out for • Practical ways to implement lessons learned from recent serious case reviews "I’d like to start by writing that this pocket book of fabulous knowledge is NOT just for social work in the child protection arena. This book has so many wonderful hints and tips surrounding home visits in general that I recommend this book as a pocket friend for anyone who, like me, is daunted by the dreaded home visit! This book is written from personal experiences and practice examples, to aid consolidation and understanding. Helpful, thought provoking questions run throughout the book, highlighting key areas to think about before and during a home visit. Alongside these questions there are ‘light bulb’ reminders to ensure that key points are easy to notice. I feel this book excels in deconstructing the situations that we all panic over, from aggressive dogs, a child answering the door or even language barriers. Additionally unlike most books, this book can be dipped in and out of, and does not need to be read from cover to cover. Conducting a home visit in child protection not only contains written information, but also contains diagrams, practice examples, transcripts, check lists and a very useful glossary! A must read for ANY social work student, Newly Qualified or Practitioner!" Natalie Heath, Social Work Student







Parenting Matters


Book Description

Decades of research have demonstrated that the parent-child dyad and the environment of the familyâ€"which includes all primary caregiversâ€"are at the foundation of children's well- being and healthy development. From birth, children are learning and rely on parents and the other caregivers in their lives to protect and care for them. The impact of parents may never be greater than during the earliest years of life, when a child's brain is rapidly developing and when nearly all of her or his experiences are created and shaped by parents and the family environment. Parents help children build and refine their knowledge and skills, charting a trajectory for their health and well-being during childhood and beyond. The experience of parenting also impacts parents themselves. For instance, parenting can enrich and give focus to parents' lives; generate stress or calm; and create any number of emotions, including feelings of happiness, sadness, fulfillment, and anger. Parenting of young children today takes place in the context of significant ongoing developments. These include: a rapidly growing body of science on early childhood, increases in funding for programs and services for families, changing demographics of the U.S. population, and greater diversity of family structure. Additionally, parenting is increasingly being shaped by technology and increased access to information about parenting. Parenting Matters identifies parenting knowledge, attitudes, and practices associated with positive developmental outcomes in children ages 0-8; universal/preventive and targeted strategies used in a variety of settings that have been effective with parents of young children and that support the identified knowledge, attitudes, and practices; and barriers to and facilitators for parents' use of practices that lead to healthy child outcomes as well as their participation in effective programs and services. This report makes recommendations directed at an array of stakeholders, for promoting the wide-scale adoption of effective programs and services for parents and on areas that warrant further research to inform policy and practice. It is meant to serve as a roadmap for the future of parenting policy, research, and practice in the United States.




The Art and Practice of Home Visiting


Book Description

"The modern home visitor's introductory textbook for effective, culturally sensitive home visits with young children and families"--




Handbook for Child Protection Practice


Book Description

"The timing of the publication with the revised Working Together guidelines could not be more advantageous. This book is a unique and important contribution to child care literature. No agency should be without." - Child Abuse Review Professionals concerned with the protection of children face many challenges. This work demands knowledge from several disciplines, a wide variety of skills, and interdisciplinary collaboration. The editors, Howard Dubowitz, a pediatrician, and Diane DePanfilis, a social worker, together with over 70 experts in this field offer what is known about how best to work with maltreated children and their families, in a very practical, concise, and user-friendly way. Structured to follow the life of a case from the time a report of child maltreatment is made through the various pathways in the child protection system, this edited volume synthesizes the best practice principles for responding to reports of child abuse and neglect; engaging children and other family members in intervention; developing cross-cultural practice competencies; assessing risk, evaluating safety, and conducting family assessments; defining outcomes and planning intervention; evaluating risk reduction; and making permanency decisions; and discusses the unique legal, medical, ethical, and other practice issues that work in the child protection field involves. Professionals facing tough dilemmas in practice should find valuable guidance in these pages.




Child Protection Practice


Book Description

"When it comes to child protection, who is showing social workers exactly what they should be doing? In this book, Harry Ferguson guides you through the day-to-day realities of child protection practice, outlining its deep complexities along with the knowledge, skills, values and organizational supports necessary to do this difficult job"--




Small Animals


Book Description

"It might be the most important book about being a parent that you will ever read." —Emily Rapp Black, New York Times bestselling author of The Still Point of the Turning World "Brooks's own personal experience provides the narrative thrust for the book — she writes unflinchingly about her own experience.... Readers who want to know what happened to Brooks will keep reading to learn how the case against her proceeds, but it's Brooks's questions about why mothers are so judgmental and competitive that give the book its heft." —NPR One morning, Kim Brooks made a split-second decision to leave her four-year old son in the car while she ran into a store. What happened would consume the next several years of her life and spur her to investigate the broader role America’s culture of fear plays in parenthood. In Small Animals, Brooks asks, Of all the emotions inherent in parenting, is there any more universal or profound than fear? Why have our notions of what it means to be a good parent changed so radically? In what ways do these changes impact the lives of parents, children, and the structure of society at large? And what, in the end, does the rise of fearful parenting tell us about ourselves? Fueled by urgency and the emotional intensity of Brooks’s own story, Small Animals is a riveting examination of the ways our culture of competitive, anxious, and judgmental parenting has profoundly altered the experiences of parents and children. In her signature style—by turns funny, penetrating, and always illuminating—which has dazzled millions of fans and been called "striking" by New York Times Book Review and "beautiful" by the National Book Critics Circle, Brooks offers a provocative, compelling portrait of parenthood in America and calls us to examine what we most value in our relationships with our children and one another.




New Directions in Child Abuse and Neglect Research


Book Description

Each year, child protective services receive reports of child abuse and neglect involving six million children, and many more go unreported. The long-term human and fiscal consequences of child abuse and neglect are not relegated to the victims themselves-they also impact their families, future relationships, and society. In 1993, the National Research Council (NRC) issued the report, Under-standing Child Abuse and Neglect, which provided an overview of the research on child abuse and neglect. New Directions in Child Abuse and Neglect Research updates the 1993 report and provides new recommendations to respond to this public health challenge. According to this report, while there has been great progress in child abuse and neglect research, a coordinated, national research infrastructure with high-level federal support needs to be established and implemented immediately. New Directions in Child Abuse and Neglect Research recommends an actionable framework to guide and support future child abuse and neglect research. This report calls for a comprehensive, multidisciplinary approach to child abuse and neglect research that examines factors related to both children and adults across physical, mental, and behavioral health domains-including those in child welfare, economic support, criminal justice, education, and health care systems-and assesses the needs of a variety of subpopulations. It should also clarify the causal pathways related to child abuse and neglect and, more importantly, assess efforts to interrupt these pathways. New Directions in Child Abuse and Neglect Research identifies four areas to look to in developing a coordinated research enterprise: a national strategic plan, a national surveillance system, a new generation of researchers, and changes in the federal and state programmatic and policy response.




Handbook of Child Maltreatment


Book Description

This Handbook examines core questions still remaining in the field of child maltreatment. It addresses major challenges in child maltreatment work, starting with the question of what child abuse and neglect is exactly. It then goes on to examine why maltreatment occurs and what its consequences are. Next, it turns to prevention, treatment and intervention, as well as legal perspectives. The book studies the issue from the perspective of the broader international and cross-cultural human experience. Its aim is to review what is known, but even more importantly, to examine what remains to be known to make progress in helping abused children, their families, and their communities.