To wonder why social services put so much emphasis on a tidy home?

[superstarheartbreaker]

Have read a few threads where the poor op has been worried as ss criticise the state of a house. Assuming the house does not look like an episode from Hoarder Next Door, Aibu to believe that a tidy home is not necessarily a happy home?

In my experience it varies widely with the individual social worker.

I've not had children's services experiences, but when I became seriously disabled, with a baby, and no care except an abusive ex who would leave me without food for days (ds was ok, massive upside to bf. thank God ds was a baby, so I kept him in my bed, the only bit of my environment I could control)... House was dire, infested with rodents, mould on everything, sick bowls on the floor, no way for me to move as trip hazards everywhere... Not to mention my condition was deteriorating rapidly as i coyldnt do anything medically advised. Anyway, it was bad. Really bad. Look back and well up realising how vulnerable i was, and how desperate.

But the first social worker had made her decision based on her own prejudices (area I lived in, my accent and my skin colour), and wrote a load of untrue rubbish in her assessment, told me I was trying to 'fiddle the system' and walked out without a word as I cried and begged her for help. She didn't even bother to write down my answers to her questions, and when I questioned that, she shouted at me (she asked what medication I was on, then as I was giving her the whole long list, she wrote nothing down, and then at the end I saw she'd written 'no medication needed'! Horrible woman not a reflection on sw in general, a very cruel person.

Anyway, a friend complained for me and another sw came round, and was so shocked by the environment she wouldn't even go until she'd taken away the sick and urine and nappies, given me water, and put a set of cutlery/ glasses etc into the fridge - the only place rodents hadn't got in.

So my point is... It varies! No one else in ss has judged my house since, though they've been round since - obviously I got help and although ss didn't help with the immediate state of the house (friends helped pay for cleaners & £100s on pest control, they used it to assess my need as critical and an emergency. and with carers I could protect myself from abusive stbxh as I didn't need to rely on him to care for me so could boot him out for good.

Sorry I went on a tangent - I don't ever tell this stuff in rl and occasionally it's good to vent on mumsnet, helps heal I think.

Exactly... You cannot win. Tbh when the kids are toddlers all thoughts of a tidy home are a distant memory.

I remember after I had ds3 I suffered PND and part of that involved obsessive cleaning.
I used to get regular extra visits from my health visitor, if he was passing he'd pop in and he never saw my house messy or dirty.
He sat me down one day and said it was ok to have dirty dishes, clothes on the landing and toys everywhere (I had 3ds under 5 fgs! my house should have messy :) )
I had it my head that ss were going to come because of my depression and I'd be thought of as a bad mother.
Health visitor gently said my house, as it stood, WOULD give them reason to think something was wrong - it didn't look lived in.
It really woke me up and I began to just let things go a little and not panic at the little things.

When SS were involved when i was a teenager (10 years ago) my SW actually did expect a show home, we went into care because my mum was grieving, SS came round after a malicious report and the mess in the house meant in their eyes my mum wasn't coping, which was hardly surprising as my mum had been in hospital for nearly 2 weeks and had got home 3 hours before the SW turned up.

Their key concerns were:

the kitchen sides and dining table were covered in 'rubbish'. It was laundry, mum couldn't bend down to the laundry basket so had tipped the dirty stuff on the table to sort and put the wet washing on the worktop for me to put away and a pile of ironing on the other worktop, we were in the middle of doing it when the SW knocked.

The mess in the bedrooms, at the time mum had 5 children under 5 and 2 teenagers, it was just mess like toys and homework, nothing dirty, well apart from little Bro's pants which admittedly did have some poo in them and which he had taken off and left on the floor (he didn't like pants when he was small).

There were potties everywhere... there were 5 children who were in various stages of potty training, there was at least 1 potty in every room because there needed to be, they were all emptied and cleaned straight away every time they were used.

There were teddies, plastic cups and plates in the garden, a blanket discarded on the grass and food on the floor. Apparently the fact Mum had called the little ones in from their picnic to talk to the daft SW had nothing to do with this.

However, after 3 months in care and a change in SW, SS did write an apology as the original SW had been unprofessional and not followed procedures properly. in other words she was a judgey cow and lied so maybe it's just a few bad SW giving the whole of SS a bad name.

My house is what I would call lived in, I try and keep it clean and tidy, hoover make beds clean out cat litter tray bit of dusting etc takes up most of my day, its by no means a show home. one of my sofas keeps being used as a scratching post by my lovely cat, kids leave toys eveywhere but I've been shocked at how some people live, stair railings kept together with random bits of wood, bare walls with kids drawing on, carpet with what looks like shit stains on, stink of dog. I went to view a private rental once and you could have rolled the dog hair up off the carpet.

"Exactly... You cannot win."

op - that is precisely how I feel as a social worker. planning my exit - I've done my time.

Im gonna b flamed, but its my personal opinion : dirty houses are not on. I am sorry, but I am often suprised at the shitholes people live In with kids. I am not talkin about the decor or toys everywhere, but just general filthy bathrooms and dust galore. Its often wealthy folk too. Gross. Kids deserve a clean home. Not a show home, but clean.

Ermmmm, I had a social worker tell me off for 2 crumbs on the carpet. Yes the house was tidy.

YABU. I am a social worker. I don't care if you have a week's worth of clean dishes draining by the sink. I don't care if you haven't tidied away last night's takeaway box of pizza. I don't care if you only hoover once a month. I would be concerned if there was animal faeces on the floor. I would be concerned if you had no bed and slept on the shitty floor. I would be concerned if you had no food in your home and no means to obtain food. HTH.

I had a friend reported and visited by SS for a very dirty house plus letting the children walk to school by themselves. Both these things were true, she did have an appallingly dirty house, the carpets hadn't been hoovered for years, cat poop in the bathroom where they were 'training' the kittens, general chaos, rooms unusable, plus she did let the children walk to school as they were 8/9+ and walked with a friend. The children were lovely, polite, dressed properly, doing well at school, she just had a blind spot about her house that was hard to understand to be honest.

The SS immediately closed the case- I'm sure in an ideal world, we would work out in therapy why this lovely friend could hold down a professional job, had lovely children and so on but couldn't manage to keep her house in even a basic standard of cleanliness, but this is not an ideal world and essentially her children were fine, so SS were correct there were more needy families out there.

I have also noticed that where homes fall down on even basic cleanliness is when there's animals around- I think the general hair shedding, poop and mess is harder to keep on top of than without animals, although obviously lots of people do manage it.

I can believe though the reports on here of odd SW who are obsessed by cleanliness- I had a HV with no children and she said very odd things to me, she simply didn't have a clue about life with a small baby and I'm just glad she had no power to intervene.

I would not agree with the OP's title though, in general SW are not that interested in a very tidy home, as this thread shows, there may be a minority who over-judge on this but the majority are interested in general neglect, mental health issues and abuse, and tidiness is only a symptom relating to those and not a main reason for their own investigation.

www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/06/06/more-germs-less-asthma-study-shows-babies-exposed-to-bacteria-and-dander-at-less-risk.html

Interestingly this study found that babies under one who were exposed to a 'perfect storm' of horrid things (namely cat, mouse and cockroach dander as well as other stuff) were far less likely to have wheezing and asthma later on.

So, babies crawling around where there are mouse droppings might not be such a bad thing at all (if on its own, if combined with mental, physical, emotional neglect or abuse, clearly it would not be an advantage).

Adults services werent interested when they came to my shittip house (i was hoping they might be actaually), so i assume you just mean childrens services? And again, adults services werent even interested enough in the mess to inform childrens services either.

Sounds like jh-type scaremongering imo.

That is, of course im not saying that there arent bad pennies. But to generalise to an extent that people worry about it (especially when they also worry about it being "too" clean) is not accurate :)

I have to say, I had one social worker, she left me with such bad anxiety, even 4 years later, my stomach still lurches everytime someone knocks on the door.

I had SS involvement just after Ex's nephew died. We were not coping. TBH, we needed a kick up the arse. The house was a mess. What we did not need is an unprofessional, bully of a SW adding to our stresses. Which is what we got.

We had the police visit for an unrelated incident. They were ones who informed SS and I absolutely understand why they did. Things were far from great. When the police came there was a sofa full of washing. Toys, shoes and takeout cartons and empty beer cans on the floor, along with carrier bags of rubbish hanging off doors. The washing up or hoovering hadn't been done for days if not weeks in the case of the hoovering and you could barely get into the bathroom for dirty washing. The police were happy that the children were not immediate danger but needed to raise the issue with SS.

Because we'd had notice that they were coming, we asked for the help we needed from our families. By the time the SW visited, the floor was tidy and hoovered, toys had been washed and stored in new plastic storage boxes and we'd bought bins and got rid of the carriers on the door handles, but the carpet was old, worn out completely in some places and had a few stains that we couldn't remove. The washing had been re-washed, ironed and put away and the sofa hoovered. The sofa was as the carpet was old and tattered, but otherwise tidy and free of debris.

The pots had been washed and the kitchen bleached to within an inch of it's life and we'd done a full food shop. My dad had removed the kitchen carpet as it was by far the most worn in the house and had painted the concrete floor black, with a paint suitable for floors. It had been swept and mopped.

The bathroom had been tidied, bleached and the carpet hoovered. We'd hired a carpet cleaner and removed as much of the mildew and soap scum as we could from the carpet, but like in the rest of the house it was old, worn and stained.

We thought that would have been it. The SW would visit, see that we'd cleaned up and maybe call back a few times to make sure we were managing to keep on top of things now. We were wrong.

When she came around she was not happy at all with what we had done. She accused me of trying to "pull the wool over her eyes" by cleaning up when she had read the police report and knew how bad things had been. She told me I was at risk of loosing my children if I did not start to co-operate.

She left me with a list of things to improve including:

Buy a new sofa because ours was too old and tattered and might cause 4yo dd1 embarrassment if she invited friends around.

Put a floor covering down in the kitchen as concrete was a danger, if dd1 fell she might be injured (there was a stair gate at the kitchen door)

Remove the carpet from the bathroom and replace it with something more hygienic. Replace the wallpaper in the bathroom as it was peeling off in places and looked unsightly and could be a danger to dd1 if she picked at it and ate it.

Re carpet the front room as the stains could have been anything and could be what was causing dd1's digestive problems (a few weeks after being signed off from SS she was diagnosed with chronic constipation and given laxatives which solved the problems we'd been having with her) Dd1 did not eat off the floor, we had a fold out table for her.

I explained, truthfully, that we were in the middle of renovating a house we'd bought and would be moving in around 6 weeks time, the house we were moving to had new flooring, a new sofa and freshly plastered and painted walls. I explained that we had no money for new carpets and had asked the LL repeatedly for new carpet but he'd turned us down. I explained that we could not afford another new sofa and nor could we bring our new one here because the sofa we had in that house belonged to the LL and we'd have no-where to store it, plus we had no access to a van to be moving things around.

She told me that moving in the middle of an investigation would be seen as trying to evade intervention and my children "might be removed" She gave me a week to make the improvements.

I called my dad, who was incidentally the builder who was renovating our new home, in floods of tears. He called and spoke to the SW and invited her to view our new house and told her he could have it safe for us to move into within a fortnight. She told him a fortnight was not good enough, we had to make the improvements on her list within a week or I "might lose my children" and also told him we could not move until the investigation was complete. We somehow managed it, but I ended up having to take sick leave from work and ultimately lost my job, I ended up on anti depressants and having panic attacks. The house move was set back by months because we had to spend what we'd saved for it on new carpets for the LLs house. I barely slept or ate the whole time we were under SS. At one point I was up until 3am decorating the bathroom and back up at 6:30am the next morning to scrub the kitchen because I knew she was due back. Her involvement made our life 10 times harder. Not once did she offer any actual support or point us in the direction of help, she didn't even ask what had caused our problems until the day she signed us off.

At the end she admitted that she had very high standards and that SW had caused her stress illnesses and OCD in her home and had effected her relationship with her own children and that she was leaving SW because of it. I guess I should have felt sorry for her but her "issues" had cost me money, my mental health and my job. As she left she told me that if I had to have SS intervention again I would "lose my children" she seemed to like pointing that out at every given opportunity that she could take my children away.

I wasn't on MN at the time. I wish I had been as I've since learned that she was nothing more than a nasty, unprofessional bully who I should have complained about. I don't believe that all SWs are like her but she has put me off ever asking them for help again and I would think twice before reporting anyone to SS. I'd been too scared to complain while it was all going on because I thought she and she alone had the power to take my kids away, that's how she always made it sound.

DOoin that's a sad and cautionary tale. Kind of makes your username very pertinent. Hope all is ok now.

Social services do look at the living conditions. The things that concern them are :
dirty or urine soaked bedding on the children's beds.
Animal or human faeces smeared or left on the floors.
Very dirty and unhygienic kitchens (health hazard level dirty, not just a few crumbs or a bit of grease).
Cleaning chemicals not put away securely.
Drugs paraphernalia not out away securely.
Really heavy dust in a house where a child has severe asthma or eczema.

There are other things that they look for but those are a few and it isn't difficult to understand why those things would concern a social worker.
Social workers can't take a child away because mummy didn't do the hoovering or clean the sink this morning.

DOoin That is bloody awful and what she was saying is highly unlikely anyway.

Looking back, now I get angry with myself for calling my dad and not her supervisor. She'd given me a card with his number and explained that I the right to complain or request another SW if I felt unable to "get along with her or felt I was being unfairly treated" but I was terrified at the time and knew nothing more about SS than all the usual horror stories of SWs snatching children away from loving homes and babies and blond children being targeted because they are easier to adopt I did actually believe that at the time and it wasn't helped by my well meaning but hysterical Daily Fail reading mother constantly pointing out how adoptable my children were

She made it sound like the decision as to whether I could keep my children laid solely with her and I was terrified of pissing her off even more than I already seemed to have done by cleaning up in the first place. It was never explained that she'd have to issue a child protection plan, get backing from her bosses and would ultimately be in the hands of a judge, whom I seriously doubt would have taken my children away for want of a new sofa, regardless of their age or hair colour

I really should have Googled my rights or sought some kind of help for myself, but I was already dealing with my children loosing their young cousin, the effect that it had had on ex, had a 5 month old baby and a full time job and was physically and mentally wrecked before she came along, I felt like I didn't know which was up at the time, so I just did what I was told and kept my mouth shut through fear.

I found MN a few months later, but she'd already left SW by then.

I'm not sure how things could be changed to prevent lone, power hungry SWs giving the profession in general a bad name and causing misery to already vulnerable families, but something should be done. The media's portrayal of SWs disappearing children into the night never to be seen again certainly does not help.

Social services have been involved with my family for 8 years now, due to disability, and I have never had them comment on my housekeeping :) I had one sw ask to her my dd's bedroom. That was it I.m afraid

Gosh doin. I hadn't read your posts :(

The things I think that would really help take the sw as child snatcher image away:

• clarity over process - you hear stories of people being threatened by unprofessional sw who exaggerate their power and ignore due process... But do you hear of people who genuinely are surprised when they lose their children as they haven't understood how the system works and how close they are to the point of no return. Clarity. Clarity. Clarity.

• holding bad sw accountable and not instantly closing ranks or defending the indefensible. Not that sw should be hung out to dry, but they shouldn't be above the law either. I think it would help alot if they visibly differentiated between the good and the (few) bad sw - it would help build credibility and trust in their profession. Currently, by seeming to close ranks, it brings everyone else down, as it's understood that unprofessional and scary behaviour is accepted by the profession.

• and rewarding the great social workers visibly. they should have higher status and rewards - not the management but the actual front line social workers.