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Abuse and Neglect Chapter 1

I'm Dr. Susan Turben. Welcome to the first chapter of our Chapter Book. This is Chapter 1 of a 5 part series on Neglect and Abuse.

"The Guide Book for Caring Adults Who Work with Neglect and Abuse"

A chapter book created for professionals and parents who deal with the maltreatment of children in homes, agencies and child care settings

With great respect for families who have and who do not have the information Chapter one focuses on research-based skills that will engage and empower families to collaborate with professionals. Intentionality, inclusive thinking, conversational communication, listening, observation and verification will help professionals empower families to live more peacefully.

Introduction: All professionals like to keep up with advances in their profession, but lack the time or resources to do it! This guide is for those who wish to take advantage of receiving state of the art, research-based information, free of charge, via our website. This E-Chapter book discusses skills that anyone can utilize to help families live non-violently, and to feel competent to raise peaceful and cooperative children.

Readers should remember one central point: professionals with expertise in a variety of disciplines are valued and needed by parents, family members and children, even those who resist intervention or outside help. As a helping professional, you may be a human service or case coordinator (resist the urge to call families "cases"!). You may be an agency service provider or a mom or dad, grandparent, teacher, counselor, nurse or therapist. Whoever you are, read on! You are the first line of defense in protecting and safeguarding the lives of children.

Distance learning on your computer allows you to pick concepts and ideas that resonate particularly with you, your communication preferences and learning style. Imagine I am in your family room (I only make home visits), sharing ideas about the very best practices in social work, counseling, education and medicine. You are comfortable and relaxed, and can absorb the ideas on your own time and at your own pace. Encourage yourself to be open to improving your daily professional conduct, and use the skills in your daily work. Force yourself to practice the skills in each chapter, invent new ways of building healthy family relationships, and learn to collaborate. Above all, communicate with me, via e-mail at .

Families are living in a time of violence and benevolent neglect, but you will be able to contribute to the prevention of abuse and neglect through your commitment to family-centered care and intervention. I invite you to enjoy the experience. And remember, there is no fee for these chapters!

Research-based skills: This guide suggests new ways of doing old business. Remember there is no one way to do anything, but there are "best practices," and there is always the option of a better way. Our study of abuse and neglect prevention will be based on only the best and most current research on physical and emotional neglect and abuse, offering "cutting edge" skill building. Research studies will inform your prior learning and experiences. In order to find the best ways to work with individual families and to have families work effectively with professionals, knowledge must be shared. Each person has expertise in something, and the first order of business for any professional is to find the strengths and areas of expertise of family members. Mutual, shared expertise is the heart and soul of collaboration and cooperation!

Intentionality: The first research-based idea is the notion of "intentionality." If you are able to help family members freely express their intentions, goals, and concerns, from their viewpoint (not yours), they will intentionally work with you as a partner and a problem-solver. They will not intentionally think of you as an interfering professional! The court system, schools and community agencies all need to learn about engaging families through the process of "intentionality."

When you practice "intentionality," you practice becoming a co-expert with a family. Rather than presenting yourself as the "boss," you engage the caregivers and honor their strengths. You will learn to listen, observe, and verify what you see and hear, and avoid judgmental conclusions. "Intentionality" saves precious time, and gives you a reliable snapshot of family priorities, issues and concerns.

Inclusive thinking: When professionals engage in inclusive thinking, they learn to seek and hunt down resources and mechanisms to insure that every parent and child has the opportunity to be included in whatever educational or social setting the family chooses. Further, families are in charge, and professionals become out-sourcers in the community. After all, who would argue that families have the psychological and legal right to be included, even if it's not "the way things are done"?

Professionals who practice inclusive thinking make every effort to behave as child, family and community advocates. Inclusive thinking requires reinventing the old fashioned notion of "brainstorming." Use this technique both in the home and workplace. Discuss with your colleagues ways to increase your collective tolerance for collaborating with each other, solely for the convenience and benefit of a family goal, issue or priority. Ask family members, "What do you want to be your focus? What issues and priorities weigh on your mind?" Then say, "that's a real focus or need of yours right now, so let's work on it. Let's think about more positive situations than negative ones, so your family can benefit." Once you learn to accept that whatever needs or services a parent or family member thinks are valid, you gain respect as "a brainstormer," not a "know-it-all"!

A family who is "difficult," who is hard to engage, or hard to pin down to really personal goals is a challenge. Sometimes it helps to go where the action is. There is no reason not to visit a worksite, a home, a store, or the home of a relative-wherever the family needs to be to feel comfortable, and occasionally, more safe. Remember that the higher the level of parent/family comfort and freedom, the greater the chance that the family will immediately feel empowered and willing to accept intervention, rather than oppose it. Train yourself to acknowledge the rights of families to live as normally and as inclusively integrated as all families.

Conversational communication: Chatting and informally talking helps to lower family irritability, and compared with direct instruction or giving expert advice, decreases the amount of time it takes to gain a family's trust. Who can blame families who reject even the best advice, if they have been talked down to or addressed as if they were less intelligent or experienced?

Avoid talking and observing in ways that hassle parents or make them feel incompetent. Families who have abuse, neglect or maltreatment issues already feel blamed, often deny the accusations, and may become confrontational. An informal conversational style sends a "feel-comfortable" message. In one study, court personnel and childcare workers who met families outside their clinics, schools or offices were found to be able to set legal agendas and educational goals more quickly than professionals who resisted meeting families in more informal conversational settings.

Listen, observe and verify: These are three efficient strategic ways to reach out to abusive families who may or may not believe in themselves as competent to nurture children. Did you know that adults almost always rely on the way they were raised, and believe they are not good people? They think of themselves as stupid, wrong, judgmental and even capable of violence toward less powerful people. If you, as a professional, want families to feel non-violent and calm, you will listen, observe and verify. Identify their talents and strengths. Communicate these strengths to the family, and verify that they can be good, even great parents! Resistive families need to know they are capable of increasing their confidence, facing their problems with courage, and parenting in a better, more peaceful way.

Sadly, it is unusual to find professionals in any discipline who are trained to listen, observe and verify positive traits in families. Research shows that visits to medical experts are more cost efficient and satisfactory to parents and children when the professionals identified family strengths, rather than weaknesses. Temperament research studies show that if a teacher or therapist identifies child strengths and positive developmental traits to parents in the first three years of their child's life, the child is more successful in school than a matched group whose parents were told only that their child was doing "fine." Pediatric studies show that children of parents given this kind of "wait and see" advice usually have legitimate problems that may take up to eight years to ameliorate.

Among professionals, a commitment to positive, supported adult-child communication and complimentary behavior is often missing. Parents with negative family histories or economic troubles or who come from generations of prejudice or abuse themselves, have good reason to feel that professionals are do-gooders, outsiders and a threat. Institutions, especially medical and educational ones, treat many parents as sick, having disorders, problems or disabilities. Find the best traits of a child or family member, not the weakest. Listen to family stories, observe what families do together and separately, and verify the observationally based "good things." What did you observe, even the slightest thing, about their children, the weather, their cooking, or their neighborhood, that they might consider a compliment or genuine praise? Help parents learn this form of complimentary interaction as well.

Practice your complimentary behavior as part of the interview process. Start any interview "smart" by giving a compliment, even if you have to struggle to find one.
If the skill of complimenting and finding strengths is difficult to learn, convince yourself to do it at the point of first family contact. Family members are more quickly conditioned to tolerate a professional level of intervention and intrusion when you listen, allow time to let parental ideas sink in, and then offer a compliment, along with your expert advice.

Identification of strengths is the hardest skill to learn, because as a "helping" professional you have been trained (a) to tell families what to do, (b) to communicate through rules and regulations, (c) to see the family as having a problem you should, with all your knowledge be able to fix, and (d) to see the family as "in trouble" (if not, neither they nor you would be there). If you practice the observational and listening skills outlined in this chapter you will soon find that identifying strengths becomes second nature, and your effectiveness with families increases dramatically. Start today!

Summary: See you next month! How did you like your first dose of great ideas for building better relationships? Via email at offer any feedback, and thanks for your participation.

To get you thinking about next month's topics and skills have some fun playing a favorite game of mine. As an energizer, share with a colleague the name of a person (famous, or not so famous) who has a family life style that is like yours, and one that is very different. What kind of a parent would Ally McBeale or Bill Cosby make? Everybody loves Raymond, so are your relatives like his? Is Ricky Martin like you?

Thanks for logging on…Dr. Susan Turben

Chapter II - Abuse and Neglect