Rebecca Brown is a Research Associate at the Centre for Child and Family Research, UK. Together with Harriet Ward and David Westlake, she’s co-written the latest book in the Safeguarding Children Across Services series called Safeguarding Babies and Very Young Children from Abuse and Neglect, which explores key issues surrounding the safeguarding process and coincides with NSPCC’s All Babies Count[... read more]

“The biggest challenge for the young people themselves is when they are trying to work out how to deal with their anger in response to extremely difficult circumstances, which they have to contend with on a daily basis, such as cyberbullying, witnessing domestic violence in the home or witnessing parental substance abuse. Young people under these circumstances have such a right to feel angry, but the biggest challenge is to find a way to let go of that anger or to express it in a constructive way, especially when the options to move away from the difficult life issues are limited. “

“Underachieving children typically don’t feel connected. The process of training children to reframe their visual connectedness with the world is not only about vision. It is about utilizing vision to reframe the relationship between children’s inner reality and their external reality. Vision is merely the vehicle, the classroom, the training ground. The true benefits accrue when a child, perhaps your son or daughter, takes what he or she has achieved in the safe and nurturing environment of therapy and applies it to the outside world. It is then that a child’s entire sense of who they are and what they are capable of, has been modified for the better.”

“It is important that professionals in the field of Child Welfare come to grips with the fact that their job is not to ‘save’ children or families but to help them cope in the best possible way with the realities of their life experiences. In making major life decisions on behalf of clients – such as decisions about moves, reunification, etc. – it is important to realize that there is rarely an absolute right vs. wrong decision. … The goal is to implement the decision in a way that minimizes the negatives and accentuates the positives, and that helps the child continue to successfully meet challenges in his own individual journey through life.”

“The problem with self-harm and suicidal behaviour is that it is easily hidden, carries considerable stigma and is misunderstood by many professional staff. Evidence suggests that it is increasing as a generation of young people are exposed to a harsh economic and social climate, competition for higher education and skills training, and increases in poverty, unemployment and parents under considerable stress. Young people find ways of coping in these circumstances and self-harm is a strategy many are using to cope with feelings of anger, despair and hopelessness.”

“What we offer is a model to show how problems escalate and how these problems are connected to relational contexts. We are encouraging people, particularly professionals, to communicate with each other and to look at the bigger picture. This is not a problem that can be tackled alone – but it can be tackled. To do so, we have to talk to each other. As professionals, we also need to collaborate more on combating mental health problems. This is an educational process, heightening awareness of how depression manifests itself but also removing the stigma of mental health.”

Before Christmas, JKP author Josh Muggleton came to our offices and recorded a series of top tips for parents, professionals and people with Asperger syndrome, all based on his own hard-won experience. In this video, he offers parents and professionals advice on tackling an all too common problem for children on the spectrum: bullying.  [... read more]

“The idea was born out of a spirit of collaboration that came up when we noticed that our students were working on similar projects but with an OT or SLP spin. Another way we came together was when the speech team would make quesadillas with the students to work on sequencing, vocabulary and describing goals. And the OT would say, “Can I jump into your activity to practice cutting the quesadilla into triangles with my student?” And so we began to purposely create activities around both OT and SLP goals. We recently found out that the University of California – San Francisco has built therapy rooms for the explicit purpose of the collaboration between therapists. This is a wonderful step towards collaborative therapy.”

“Younger children have a much better chance to learn how to handle anger and do so easier. The formative years are really what we need to target. Giving young children simple but powerful words to express anger and hurt means many will have fewer problems with anger than older children… It’s also important for the young child to really get that ‘abusive behaviour is not OK’. Learning that 20 years later in a courtroom or through a painful break-up is so much harder on the person and society.”

“On the whole newly qualified social workers are not very confident in talking about diversity. It is an area that receives considerable attention during training, but there is often a sense that there is a ‘right answer’ and people are frightened of speaking for fear of getting it wrong. Most people do not want to offend anyone else, so become self-monitoring and wary of the subject. It is only in a spirit of learning – where we can all get things wrong on occasion, and need others to be able to point things out and explain why particular words, phrases or behaviours are not acceptable to them – that we are then able to modify our own behaviours.”