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So often, the ills of society are blamed on negligent parenting, leading to the development of social service policies built around the concept of early intervention. Interrogating this concept, this book explores the history of our understanding of children, family, and parenting, and its implications for society. With a particular focus on the intersection of brain science and social policy, the authors challenge our long-held consensus on early intervention. Accessibly written and highly topical, this book is a comprehensive and critical assay of our contemporary belief that so-called bad parents raise substandard future citizens unfit for the new capitalism.

Numerous books have been written about Victorian child-care pioneers, but few biographical studies have been published about more recent child-care and welfare pioneers. This book looks at the lives of six inspirational individuals who have made significant contributions to the well being of disadvantaged children over the course of the twentieth century. Each of the six discussed – Eleanor Rathbone, Marjory Allen, Clare Winnicott, John Stroud, Barbara Kahan, and Peter Townsend – has been important in establishing present systems of ch ild care and child welfare, and in stimulating debate around issues that remain high on policy and practitioner agendas today.

There are, sadly, children whose lives are severely blighted by abuse, by neglect and by separation from their parents. Ways have been devised to protect and care for them. Some have been encouragingly enlightened while others have been deeply misguided. These essays describe and explain the significant political, economic, legal and ideological factors that have shaped this history from the mid-1850s up to the present day. In this, as much emphasis has been given to accounting for the unchanging nature of certain problems, issues and assumptions as to what has changed: hence the title. However, the essays look forward as well as looking back and in doing so endeavour to discern the likely pattern of future developments in the nature and scale of the problems with which the children’s services grapple and in the policies to which they give rise. Two key questions follow. How far will such policies be informed by well-founded evidence and how far by uninformed political conviction or by the legacies of the past? And will there be the necessary skill, commitment and compassion for the lives of our most vulnerable children to be enhanced, not least by forestalling the ills that are liable to befall them?

The general well-being of British adolescents has been the topic of considerable debate in recent years, but too often this is based on myth rather than fact. Are today's young people more stressed, anxious, distressed or antisocial than they used to be? What does research evidence tell us about the adolescent experience today and how it has changed over time? And how do trends in adolescent well-being since the 1970s relate to changes in education, leisure, communities and family life in that time? This unique volume brings together the main findings from the Nuffield Foundation's Changing Adolescence Programme and explores how social change may affect young people's behaviour, mental health and transitions toward adulthood. As well as critiquing research evidence, which will be of interest to a wide academic audience, the book will inform the wider debate on this subject among policy makers and service providers, voluntary organisations and campaign groups

Health and social care professionals are constantly exhorted to work collaboratively. This book reports on research which examines inter-professional work with families in which mothers have a mental health problem and where there are also concerns about child protection. Breakdowns in inter-professional collaboration, issues of risk and relevant resources are all addressed. Mothers' views and experiences are contrasted with professional perspectives. The book reports on a survey of 500 practitioners working in health, social services and the voluntary sector, presents data from in-depth interviews with mothers with severe mental health problems, identifies weaknesses in inter-professional coordination in this area of work, and suggests a new model for work with families where mental health problems and child protection concerns co-exist.

Most slave trades were abolished during the nineteenth century, yet there remain millions of people in slavery today, amongst them approximately 210 million children in slavery, trafficked, debt bondage, and other forms of forced labour. This book, drawing on experience worldwide, focuses on child slavery and shows how children remain locked in slavery, the ways in which they are exploited, and how they can be emancipated. It examines child labour, child trafficking, and child exploitation in various countries such as Nepal, Turkey, Uganda, South and Southeast Asia, India, Central America, and the United Kingdom.

The viability, quality and sustainability of publicly supported early childhood education and care services is a lively issue in many countries, especially since the rights of the child imply equal access to provision for all young children. But equitable provision within childcare markets is highly problematic, as parents pay for what they can afford and parental income inequalities persist or widen. This book presents recent, significant research from eight nations where childcare markets are the norm. It also includes research about ‘raw’ and ‘emerging’ childcare markets operating with a minimum of government intervention, mostly in low income countries or post transition economies. Childcare markets compares these childcare marketisation and regulatory processes and the format of any public investment across the political and economic systems in which they are embedded. Contributions from economists, childcare policy specialists and educationalists address the question of what constraints need to be in place if childcare markets are to deliver an equitable service. Evidence is presented that marketisation and privatisation, including corporatisation, risk deepening, consolidating or widening inequalities of access to early childhood education and care provision and driving qualitative differences between types of provider. The book documents the varied economic and policy backdrops of current childcare market systems, examines their consequences for parents, children, providers and the systems themselves, and finally explores alternative approaches.

Little is known about the experiences of children living in families affected by severe and enduring mental illness. This book provides an in-depth study of children and young people caring for parents affected in this way. Drawing on primary research data collected from forty families, this book presents the perspectives of children (young carers), their parents and the key professionals in contact with them. The book contributes to the growing evidence base on parental mental illness and outcomes for children. It examines the experiences and needs of children caring for parents with severe mental illness, provides the perspectives of children, parents and key professionals in contact with these families, reviews existing medical, social, child protection and young carers' literatures on parental mental illness and consequences for children, provides a chronology and guide to relevant law and policy affecting young carers and parents with severe mental illness, makes concrete recommendations and suggestions for improving policy and professional practice and contributes to the growing evidence base on parental mental illness and outcomes for children and families.

Many policy and practice initiatives that aim to prevent social exclusion focus on children and young people. This book considers new approaches to understanding the complexities of prevention, and how these new understandings can inform policy and practice. Preventative initiatives such as the National Evaluation of the Children's Fund (NECF) have supported large-scale complex evaluations that have generated rich and important data about strategies for addressing social exclusion and what they can achieve. The book uses evidence from the NECF to illustrate and explore the experiences of children and families who are most marginalised. It examines the historical context of approaches to child welfare, and presents a new framework for understanding and developing preventative polices and practice within the context of social exclusion.

As internet use is extending to younger children, there is an increasing need for research focusing on the risks young users are experiencing, as well as the opportunities, and how they should cope. With expert contributions from diverse disciplines and a uniquely cross-national breadth, this timely book examines the prospect of enhanced opportunities for learning, creativity and communication set against the fear of cyberbullying, pornography and invaded privacy by both strangers and peers. Based on an impressive in-depth survey of 25,000 children carried out by the EU Kids Online network, it offers wholly new findings that extend previous research and counter both the optimistic and the pessimistic hype. It argues that, in the main, children are gaining the digital skills, coping strategies and social support they need to navigate this fast-changing terrain. But it also identifies the struggles they encounter, pinpointing those for whom harm can follow from risky online encounters. Each chapter presents new findings and analyses to inform both researchers and students in the social sciences and policymakers in government, industry or child welfare who are working to enhance children's digital experiences.

Human development is about the growth of agency, which is developed in interaction with parents and families but if parental agency is insufficient, agency in the form of child welfare will be required to fill the gaps. This book provides a holistic view of how children develop agency, combining social, psychological and child development aspects, as well as examining child welfare structures and the roles of social workers. This focus will make a contribution to current debates about child welfare and child protection.

This book contributes to the understanding of care and care work in children's services in Britain in the early twenty-first century. It provides insights into the factors that influence why people enter and leave care work, their motivations, and the intersection of their work with their family lives. Focusing on four diverse groups of workers – residential social workers, foster carers, family support workers, and community child-minders – who take on the care of vulnerable children and young people in the context of relatively low levels of qualifications, the book examines their life course as care workers. It explores the range of factors that attract people into care work, including the biographical circumstances and the serendipitous factors that propel them into the work, their understandings of and commitment to it, and how their identities as care workers are created and sustained. The book is highly relevant to current policy debates about the development of children's services and reforming the childcare workforce, and offers a range of practical recommendations.

This original book explores the importance of geographical processes for policies and professional practices related to childhood and youth. Contributors from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds explore how concepts such as place, scale, mobility and boundary-making are important for policies and practices in diverse contexts. Chapters present both comprehensive cutting-edge academic research and critical reflections by practitioners working in diverse contexts, giving the volume wide appeal. The focus on the role of geographical processes in policies and professional practices that affect young people provides new, critical insights into contemporary issues and debates. The contributions show how local and national concerns remain central to many youth programmes; they also highlight how youth policies are becoming increasingly globalised. Examples are taken from the UK, the Americas and Africa. The chapters are informed by, and advance, contemporary theoretical approaches in human geography, sociology, anthropology and youth work, and will be of interest to academics and higher-level students in those disciplines. The book will also appeal to policy-makers and professionals who work with young people, encouraging them to critically reflect upon the role of geographical processes in their own work.

This book employs a unique ‘bottom-up’ approach to learning. Vivid examples of social work practice with children and families are presented, providing real life illustrations of the dilemmas and challenges facing practitioners. Educators and practitioners provide analytic commentaries on course work submitted by social workers studying on a post-qualifying programme, indicating what went well, what didn't go well, and where improvements might have been made. Implications for policy and practice from the perspective of the middle manager are provided, along with a list of learning points. The book offers advice on how to realise practice in a course work context, how to assess course work and enhance practice performance, how to approach specific pieces of work, and how to promote best practice, providing standards for both training and practice rooted in the reality of the workplace.

For 40 years or more, social work and child protection have been subject to accelerating cycles of crisis and reform. Each crisis involves intense media and political scrutiny and public outcry following the serious harm or death of a child through extreme abuse or neglect. Policy reforms are characterised by attempts to eradicate risk through tighter controls on professional practice. This book argues that this cycle is driven by collective emotions that do political work. By introducing the concept of ‘emotional politics’, the book highlights how emotions such as disgust, anger and shame are deeply political. They are reflected and activated through political rhetoric, the media and official documents. Emotions in this sense are structured, embedded in institutions and stratified, with particular groups being the focus for anger and shame. Central to understanding emotional politics are the following: emotions relating to gender, social class and ‘race’; the meaning of the child and childhood in cultural, political and socioeconomic terms; the impact of high levels of inequality and economic insecurity; and the so-called emotionalisation of politics. The ideas in the book are based on original research involving the qualitative documentary analysis of newspaper articles, official documents and political speech. The book concludes by arguing for a new emotional politics based on a solidaristic notion of compassion for social suffering and an enhanced public institutional role for social work.

This book presents innovative international research into how the term “environment” is understood within families and how that plays out in everyday lives. Based on a study that involved creative qualitative work with families in India and the United Kingdom, the book shows how environmental practices are negotiated in families, and how they relate to values, identities, and society. Through that analysis, we begin to see the ways in which families and childhood are constructed as sites for intervention in debates about climate change. The book explores the situated, dynamic, and relational complexities, and of the ways in which space, place, and time intersect with meanings of environment in the everyday lives of children and families. It looks at the sort of environmental issues that families in India and the UK negotiate, and how children are often responsibilised in environmental policy and media discourses in both India and the UK.

Policy reforms to children's services in the UK and elsewhere encourage a greater focus on outcomes defined in terms of child well-being. Yet for this to happen, we need not only a better understanding of what child well-being is and how services can improve it, but also the ability to measure child well-being in order to evaluate success. This book investigates the main approaches to conceptualising child well-being, applies them to the child population using household survey and agency audit data, then considers the implications for children's services. The book provides a clear conceptual understanding of five perspectives on well-being: need, rights, poverty, quality of life and social exclusion; demonstrates the value of each perspective; charts levels of child well-being in an inner-London community; including violated rights and social exclusion; and sets out the features that children's services must have if they are to improve child well-being defined in these terms.

Family group conferences (FGCs) are a strengths based approach to social work practice, empowering families to take responsibility for decision-making. It is a cost-effective service, which is currently used by the majority of local authorities. This book discusses the origins and theoretical underpinnings of family-led decision-making and brings together the current research on the efficacy and limitations of FGCs into a single text. The book also covers topics such as the use of FGCs in different areas of children and families social work, uses case studies to illustrate current practice, and explores whether FGCs should become a mainstream function of children and families social work.

This book provides a rich and detailed understanding of the experiences and perspectives of grassroots youth workers in England. Drawing on three years of qualitative research and written by an experienced practising youth worker, the book paints a picture of passionate and committed practitioners who love their work and care about young people. However, the study finds that their practice is obstructed and transformed by policy in the guise of spending cuts, privatisation, target cultures and surveillance, underpinned by neoliberal ideologies that impose market mechanisms on even the most grassroots forms of youth work. Grassroots youth workers engage in substantial and complex emotional labour and work in precarious situations, and their voices are rarely heard in policy or research. This book takes seriously their critique of target cultures and profit imperatives, as well as their celebration of creating open spaces for young people to be together, exploring their worlds and themselves. The book explores some of the ways in which youth workers engage in everyday forms of resistance in relation to the policy context in which they work: developing counter-discourses, engaging in refusals and rebellion, and creating alternative approaches to practice. The book finishes with recommendations for reclaiming and re-imagining youth work.

This book provides a critical analysis of ways in which risk assessment and management – now a pervasive element of contemporary policy and professional practice – are defined and applied in policy, theory, and practice in relation to children and young people. Drawing on conceptual frameworks from across the social sciences, it examines contrasting perspectives on risk that occur in different policy domains and professional and lay discourses, discussing the dilemmas of response which arise from these sometimes-contested viewpoints – from playground safety to risks associated with youthful substance use. The contributors address issues of gender, ethnicity, and socio-economic status that impact on definitions and responses to risk, and consider related concepts such as ‘risk resilience’, ‘care control’, and ‘dependence autonomy’. Each chapter provides a specific policy case study to illustrate the cross-cutting themes and issues, offering a valuable insight into the complexities of balancing responsibility for protecting the young with the benefits of risk taking and the need to allow young people to experiment.