Protecting our Children, Part 2

[Lilka]

Thought I'd start a new thread because the other one was so big

Anyone else going to be watching?

Hunty- it was Mike that stopped going for contact, which is my experience, lots of parents don't have the will, even when you are pulling all the stops out for them.

I put a package together for a mum in a new proporty with support. She walked into area office and left the children and threw the keys at the woman on the desk and walked out with a suitcase declaring that she was going on holiday, but didn't want the children back.

She has been in touch to say that she is well but the children can go for adoption. I feel awful because i worked hard thinking that this situation could be turned around,in a way i have been complacent in these children's neglect, i should have pushed for removal, sooner.

These children have lived with neglect (and some abuse) whilst she has made her plans. I have since found out that one of the beds that i supplied was sold to pay for a passport, she knew what she was doing. She sold the toys and hampers that i dropped off at Christmas,what SS have done is allowed her to build up enough money to travel with. The only comfort is that whilst they had involvement life got a bit better for the children.

You have to work with all sorts of families to realise that not everyone is as you describe, Hunty, wanting to be a good parent. The ability to produce sperm or eggs does not mean that you can parent.

I can understand where you are coming from Huntlycat when you feel that Tiff could, with help been able to parent Toby. Unfortunately I feel Toby needed much more intensive and sensitive theraputic parenting to help him get over the amount of emotional neglect he had suffered.
And this is something Tiff would never be likely to be able to do.
Mike's inaction with Toby would affect Toby greatly phycologically and it would certainly do him more harm than good seeing his Dad. Don't forget Mike never turned up to see his son again once he had left Tiff.
Early neglect, which is what the children in these programmes suffered from in the main, can have quite different phycological effects than physical abuse.
The main one being sever attachment disorder - Mike certainly had this but Shaun I don't think did as he could show some empathy and could look at his child in a caring way. He had been phyisically abused and his only way of dealing with that was to blot it out with drink, drugs and self harm.
As Nananina mentioned it taked years to help a neglected child, our daughter took 3 years to be able to sit on my lap and want a cuddle. They have no idea how to react to anyone and often are over familiar with other people.
They can easily have no idea what it safe and what is not - jumping off a high wall or running straight across a road. Running off in a park and not wanting to come home although it was dark even as a toddler. Generally my children are 2 years behind their peers emotionally but are slowly catching up

They often have no idea how to control their emotions and will scream or react violently at the least little thing. An hour ago my DS came into the room to find his sister had changed the channel on the T.V. He flew at her, hit her over the head with the remote and then stampted on the remote until it was in pieces. We have holes in the walls and doors, abuse written over the walls and bedrooms where every time you tidy up they decide that pulling and tipping everthing out again is how to react to the latest little up set.
These are just a few of the things that our adoptive children have done.

Nana Nina, I wish my job were influential and important. sadly over the years I have become more jaded and do not think the court system does anything positive, other than provide a check on the actions of the state, which of course can be a big positive.

But so much time and effort is spent keeping families together in order to preserve their legal rights to respect form there family life, that by thetimemthe children are removed they are too old to settle well with a new family, or no one wants them because they are too damaged and too much work.

I have had plenty of clients who could have done it if the LA was preparedto spend £80,000 on a therapeutic residential placement. But they very rarely are, and who could blame them? Just two families a year getting that kindnof service would strip their budgets bare.

It is getting worse and worse as far as I can see. Almost all my care cases now involve the third generation, no one had a job, everyone is ground down to varying degrees by poverty, drug addiction andlackof hope or aspiration.

I don't know how you turn that around other than by removing children very quickly at a very early stage so that they have a chance to live another kind of life. But the implications of that kind of policy are enormous and chilling.

My only reservation about your comments, HuntyCat, would be that Tiffany would be offered the help she needs in the context of parenting Toby. Teaching her to be a parent would not really address all of her needs. It would be something of a plaster over a would that requires stitches. I think she would need to have a great deal of therapy to get her to the point of being able to look after herself and make good decisions about herself, with wanting to be a good parent as you did, as a long term goal.

I think the help she needs should be aimed at Tiffany the unencumbered individual (including support with coming to terms with the loss of her two children though) while the help Toby needs should be delivered in an environment that is as close as possible to 'good' as it can be.

ss and family are not able to offer the help that is needed - it's not even their role realistically.

as we've clearly seen on these shows sws are there to assess stay or go and to try to effect a cost effective outcome whilst ensuring they act within a way that does not leave them open to litigation, accusations of neglect etc. they're not a therapeutic service or a medical service or a care service. when a sw says i offered all the help possible what do they actually mean? they're not a therapist, a doctor, psychologist, an educator etc

the sws have been the children's social workers not the adults, their focus, rightly enough i think, is on protecting the child and assessing where is best for the child to be. there have been moves to try and ss more about family support services etc and there has been at times extra money given to provide that but the reality has been that that money has been immediately swallowed by the child protection needs because the caseload and needs are epic and you can't in good conscience i guess say oh we'll ringfence this money for helping families not get to the at risk stage whilst real children are at immediate and serious risk.

i think we need an extra body separate to ss to provide those services. i guess that was what surestart were trying to be - a service there for struggling families who without support would be likely to become at risk. a prevention strategy and an early intervention through support, community, parenting classes, childcare to relieve the pressure on families with disabilities etc. sadly we're seeing these kind of services go down the pan in short term money saving strategies that will cost more in the long run.

so actually whilst i can see all the failings i don't think ss can address them - they're simply too busy and overstretched with real, right now crises to spend time or resources on the icing if you see what i mean.

it's like you couldn't expect the fire brigade to provide fire safety education and fit smoke alarms for old ladies and go into schools and talk to children if they had a limited budget and manpower and were under siege with forest fires to fight. before you can get into the prevention and education business you have to not be all stuck on the frontline fighting imminent threats.

long random sorry. but it's not ok for ss to say there's nothing you can do for this situation because i'm sure there are many things we could try and do. it's more accurate for them to say there's nothing we can do about this in the way we are currently run and funded and trained and with the workload and situation we face.

i also personally think that other existing institutions have to take on more of a role. such as schools! i was a secondary school teacher for 5 years and was stunned at the lack of mental health education, intervention for children with clearly fucked up backgrounds, intervention and support for children showing clear signs of dysfunctional behaviour that was going to take them down the track of ending up in the criminal justice system, etc etc. there is so much more that could be done so to say 'you can't break the cycle' is just a phallacy when we haven't even really tried. ss is there at the end point where it's broken, prior to that a million opportunities will have been missed. someone will have been failed by several institutions by the time they reach the stage we've seen people at in these shows.

realistically they'll have been failed even by their neighbours and extended family as infants who witnessed the shit they were living through let alone hcps, educators, mental health services, ss etc.

SWAF I suspect you are trying to "blind us with science" in your last post but to me it comes across as very garbled and I cannot make any sense of what you are saying. Many times you say "we" see this that or the other - who is this "we"

How about giving us some straightforward info that you have on something specific that makes some sense. Have you any comment on the theory of how the baby's earliest days, weeks and months and in particular the first 3 years of life are affected by parents who are neglectful or abusive?
Corcory has given some very useful information about the trouble she is having with her adopted children who suffered trauma in their early childhood and has this has affected them in later life.

You refer to "archaic" theories - which theories would those be? Sue Gerhardt is a psychoanalytical psycotherapist in private practice. She was the cofounder of the Oxford Paren Infant Project, a pioneering charity that provides psycotherapeutic help to parents with their babies. Her book "Why Love Matters" was published in 2004 (hardly archaic)

Sue G explores how the earliest relationship shapes the baby's nervous system. She shows how the development of the brain can affect future emotional well being, and goes on to look at "pathways" that can affect the way we respond to stress and can contribute to conditions such as anorexia, addiction and anti-social behaviour.

WHY LOVE MATTERS (I am now copying straight from the book) is a lively and accessible interpretation of the latest findings in neuroscience, psychology, psychoanalysis and biochemsitry. (Comment by Susie Orbach)

Look I don't want to try to be competetive and I trust that is also your position, and I'm interested in whether we can find some common ground in this important discussion

Spero I can well understand how you are feeling in relation to your work in the family courts. As you say it is of vital importance that the court can ensure that the LA has evidenced why the child should be removed.

I also agree that children are left too long with abusive/neglectful parents (who are of course victims of their own childhoods - almost always abusive/neglectful etc) You will of course know that the first duty of the sw is to keep families together wherever possibe, and I think many sws get over involved with trying every whichway to support the family and the needs of the child get overlooked. However as I'm sure you know applications for Care Orders increased by 50% following the death of Peter Connolly. Clearly social workers were worried that they would have a Baby P on their caseload.

Not sure though that money alone can help struggling parents who are usually young, emotionally immature, no family support, often with MH difficulties, LDs etc etc., and the only model of parenting that they have is the kind they experienced.

I can understand so clearly your comment about 3rd generation young people who are unemployed, ground down etc etc and it is only going to get worse because this coalition govt cares nothing for the most disadvantaged people in our society and is "pulling the rug" from under them with their "reforms" - I have been involved with a few families about the work capability test and I had read in the press that even people with cancer who were undergoing chemotherapy would be expected to work. To be honest I didn't believe it, until I got the questionnare that is sent to people currently on incapacity/invalidity benefit, prior to their work capability assessment and there it was: Are you having chemotherapy
If yes what was the date of your last treatment
What is the date of your next treatment.

I commented to a friend recently (who is a competent historian) that this govt is taking us back to the 30s and he said "more like the 1880s"

Sorry I am going off on one, I just feel so frustrated and angry about the way people are being treated.

Back to the subject under discussion - I have been challenged on threads for saying that no -one has ever found a way to break into the cycle of deprivation, and so I agree with your last para entirely. I am old enough to remember Keith Joseph (Home Sec) in the Tory govt said in 1974 "classes 4
and 5 should not be allowed to breed" going by the registrar general's analysis of class of course. Horrendous. Tony Blair had some half baked idea about sws identifying children and foetuses who would be likely to have an ASBO in later life ........quite what was supposed to happen next wasn't made clear!!

I am thankfully retired from social work but some of my younger ex colleagues are also jaded, with the budget cuts, enormous caseloads etc etc.

'Classes 4 and 5 should not be allowed to breed'. Half baked ideas by a PM about SW's identifying children and foetuses who would be likely to have an ASBO in later life....

Sounds like Eugenics to me.

And this is within the last 40 years for the first comment, and presumably within the last 10 years for the second. .

And I DO agree that not everyone can be helped - I know that my OWN mother would not have been able to parent ME effectively even given all the help under the sun.

BUT, that STILL fails to convince me that removal before the RIGHT TARGETTED support has been put into place and tried is the right thing to do. I STILL feel that Social Services support should be directed at the FAMILY, not just the child. I STILL feel that so much more COULD be done to enable the majority of people whose dc are on the At-risk register to become good parents.

And money put in at THAT point will SAVE money in the long run - money that will end up being spent on MH services, the prison service, the probation service, CP, crime, the NHS, Foster Carers etc.

OK, not everyone is ABLE to be a good parent. But that shouldn't stop SS from TRYING. I have seen far too many times in RL, situations where ALL the parent needed was more PRACTICAL support. A Homestart volunteer, or someone similar, to teach them WHAT housework is necessary, how often each job should be done, and HOW to do that job. Parenting courses - with updates for each developmental stage. How to budget - that can cause a surprising amount of issues, if you just have NO clue how to budget, and to make a small amount of money last a week, or a fortnight, or a month, and how to PRIORITISE that money. Because if you only have enough to do two things, and you need to do three - how do you know WHICH two you should do? Cookery classes, to teach the parents how to make cheap, yet nutritious meals. How often dental appointments and opticians appointments need to be. HOW to brush their child's teeth. Teach the parents the importance of immunisations. Teach the parents how to sing songs, and do craft with their children.

All these things were things that Surestart actually did very well. It's just such a shame that the funding for this has been cut so dramatically.

at a very basic level that most of us will take for granted teach the parents the importance of simple things like counting buttons - one, two, three. it sounds ridiculous but there are so many basic things that those of us brought up in families with even a little clued-upness as to how to help children forward in their development and skills learnt (even if they didn't think about it but just auto emulated what they had).

basic education as to what and why and how.

I haven't read NN's posts as either bigoted or prejudiced. I too thought the analysis in 'why love matters' had not been debunked. It doesn't mean you write people off forever, but early trauma has very serious and long lasting impacts and needs a lot of work to overcome.

Which is why I agree with swallowed posts - SW are not the right people to help with the changes people so desparately need. The only thing that seems to have worked with the most hard to help families are intensive therapeutic placements at the Cassel hospital for eg. These are extremely expensive.

You simply can't teach people 'good parenting skills' and expect them to stick if that person fundamentally does not understand the need for nuture because they were never nurtured themselves. That requires some heavy duty intervention to overcome. The analogy with the fire service is spot on.

SWAF - your very unkind (bordering on offensive) personal comments do not matter a jot to me. I know about my social work career and you don't. I do notice however that you have not answered any of the points I raised in my post above.
Hmmm..............wonder why that is????

I will remind you. I can't do that paste thing that people do, probably because I am not educate enough.

Ok I asked :

a) Who is the "we" to which you refer?

b) Have you any comments to make about the way in which a babies first days, weeks and months and especially the first 3 years of life will affect a child who is parented by abusive/neglectful parents.

c) What exactly are these "archaic" theories to which you refer?

No doubt about the eugenics HuntyCat, and I think there is a lot of that attitude still there.

I hold no truck with eugenicists, particuarly as most of them probably wouldn't permit me to breed as I was born with a serious deformity.

But I do get frustrated when the debate seems to stall around protestations that it should never be about money and what price a child etc, etc.

I can give you the price of putting back together a seriously damaged family - it is between £80-100,000.

As resources are definitely finite we urgently need to consider as a society what we are prepared to spend our taxes on, what is really important to us? But as there will be no votes in this, no Gov will ever do the necessary thinking. I think the divisions in society will become more and more entrenched, between the haves and the never had and never wills. I am extremely pessimistic about the future.

Was it a BAD THING that that amount of money was probably spent on me and MY family?

It certainly wasn't bad for me. Or my 4 dc. And it isn't bad for Society in general - because I am making sure that my DC are brought up with routine, rules and love. And won't be running riot round the streets or committing crimes. And there won't be the same financial input needed with my CHILDREN'S children. Things will now get better generation upon generation, the effects of that input into MY family when it was first starting out will ripple through future generations.

I see that as a good price to pay, in the longer term.

Huntycat, of course it was a good thing the money was spent on you and your family.

that isn't the point I am making. The point I am making is that once the money is spent on you, there were probably 100 other families who were not helped because there was no money left.

So either a lot more money is made available or a lot more people don't get the help and support they (and we as a society) need.

Ah, I get your point, Spero. There should be more money made available!

What I have never understood is people are willing to shed out extortionate amounts in private school fees or to buy a v expensive house in catchment area of good state school but rarely willing to debate how high their taxes should go to ensure that very child has a decent chance of the best life he or she could achieve.

They had better make sure the Walls of their gated communities are built very high and very strong.

The way our society is currently organised and governed appears to be in order to create a very large, miserable and hence very dangerous underclass of people.

well we are agreed on one thing then, relief that you are retired. i hope that current and future sws are better educated and not so guided by prejudice and personal beliefs.

What a ridiculous statement! Social workers cannot be guided by prejudice and personal beliefs. They are guided by the law. Social workers work within a team. They do not make individual choices in relation to a case they have. Social Workers do not remove children, a Court of Law does.

I see all this talk of 'help' is still ongoing from the previous thread. In relation to the tv programmes that were aired, they do not show all the help that would have been given.

Help is always given before making a decision to remove a child. I personally feel too much ephasis is put on this, when we're talking about a child being abused and neglected the whole time they're trying this.

I personally know of a case where the parents were offered help, in the form of someone going out to their home to teach them to clean, to make up bottles, to educate on babies routines. This was during pregnancy. None of it sunk in. Week upon week the situation remained the same. Once the baby was born he was placed in foster care. Even then, time was spent sorting out a mother and baby foster placement (mum walked out after 2 weeks), then after that both parents were offered a residential placement which would have lasted as long as required. It was organised and paid for and neither parent turned up. They also requested psychiatric reports, both parents were offered counselling (again refused). Contact was put in place twice weekly - after the first few sessions, they didn't turn up again in 6 months.

But what a complete waste of money! All I can say is that I'm very glad they started this process during pregnancy and acted quickly enough to remove the baby from their care from the start. It was all sorted by the time the baby was 6 months old. Otherwise, this baby would have been a victim of the severe neglect, possible abuse and certainly in danger as in many cases seen. This has meant be is a very happy, clever and well adjusted child. I very much doubt that would have been the case had he been placed in their care and had such a bad start.

The biggest issue in our care system is we do not, normally, remove children quickly enough and so they are usually older, already damaged and a lot of them have severe learning difficulties and SN by the time they reach the care system. With being older or with severe SN's means they have little chance of being adopted. But we see from these children who enter the care system - it is extremely hard to undo such damage caused by abuse and neglect. Some foster carers work for years with other professionals to try and undo what was done at home - sometimes they succeed (depending on other factors), sometimes the damage is just too much. If it is this difficult for them, even with removing children, showing first hand what family life is supposed to be like, giving love, attention etc - helping an adult who never experienced these years of 'normal' family life is certainly no easy task, hence why it is a realistic view that large numbers of them just simply will never be able to parent effectively.

I agree with NanaNina on most points too. The majority of Child Protection cases (all of the ones she has seen, clearly) the abusive parents were abused themselves.

To whose who think she said everyone who was abused goes on to abuse - it didn't read like that at all to me and she later confirmed this is not what she was saying.

Clearly though it has a huge impact. Some people manage to overcome abuse. But that does depend on many factors really - to what exteme you were abused, whether you managed to experience any other form of 'normal' family life - like staying over with a relative occasionally which would have helped you realise you weren't living in the 'norm', whether you made other more loving relationships - perhaps with friends, teachers, whether you've any SN, how much you intregrate with society once you leave home, whether you seek help for yourself etc. For those placed in care - those placed earlier on (providing they're not passed around too much) have a much better chance of overcoming abuse and living a normal life than those who enter the care system in their teens.

It is much harder (sometimes not impossible) to undo such damage with a teen - they've suffered much longer, they do not know any different and there's not the years of extensive work to completely change their views and way of thinking, they're less dependent, less influenced by you then and already have their own ideas and beliefs, they're more intetested in being with and the word of their peers (who are more likely to be just like them) unlike a young child who hangs off your every word. Of course, once a teen leaves the care system at 16 (or is it 18?) having not overcome their abuse then the likelihood of repairing what has been done in adult life is virtually non-existent and they again fall into the same cycle. The only way to break into this, I feel is early intervention.

Sorry, but I'll agree to disagree with you there. I left the care system on my 16th birthday when the FC threw me out.

I agree that there will always be SOME cases that are not going to be fixable. But that is by no means all. No matter WHAT age the person is.

I think my childhood was a VERY extreme series of abusive situations - as attested to by the fact that despite me being 30yo, I am STILL not allowed to see my SW file due to the 'risk of serious psychological harm'. Which is the only reason SS can refuse a request to read the record.

I could, theoretically, go to court and INSIST on seeing it - but I have decided that I will not do that until my DC are grown up and have left home.

Doesn't make me any less of a good parent NOW. I pass a CRB check. I volunteer to hear dc read at my dc's primary school. I often help out on the school trips. I am a normal parent. I worry about DD chosing the right options for her future, I worry about DS1 passing his 11+, I worry about my sensitive DS2 in the rough-and-tumble of the playground, I worry about whether DS3 is meeting his milestones. I love to play board games with the dc, and we do lots of crafts together. I am just another normal parent, albeit one who had a REALLY shitty childhood!

and you are the living proof it is possible huntycat - and not the only one and you can't be written off as some kind of anomaly whilst still asserting most people will never be able to change, learn better etc.

Sorry to but in here as I am not really an authority on this subject (apart a bit of time teaching in a sec school in south london), but is there some kind of assumption here that once damaged teenagers leave the care system at 16 they are almost impossible to 'fix', and practically adults who should be able to fend for themselves?

Sorry if I'm taking the wrong slant on some people's arguments, but that is kind of the gist I'm getting, and if that is the case I am very sad to hear that. They are so young at 16, I'd consider them still children in many ways, and need more guidance than ever.

Isn't a massive part of the problem a dip in support for that age group?

I mentioned up thread I wish there were more voluntary organisations and charities dealing with 'troubled' teenagers, wonder if other people here think that wouldn't be a huge help. Somewhere for them to hang out, learn skills etc. after school - are places like that common or not?

And sorry, I know these mumsnet arguments are exhausting and this thread was probably reaching it's natural end...!