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Abuse & Neglect - Chapter 3...
I'm Dr. Susan Turben. Welcome to the third chapter of our E Chapter Book. This is Chapter 3 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
Chapter Three emphasizes learning how to become an effective family community advocate and counseling professional, acting as a "guide" for families from many backgrounds. Advocacy skills, including understanding family belief systems, are stressed. All professionals need to advocate for, but not overprotect families.
Introduction: Working with families is a lot like traveling for a month's time with people you have just met and are getting to know, but with whom you are not intimately acquainted. Compare the experience to a group tour you decide to take, to a place you have always wanted to go to, but have very little real knowledge about. You pack, not knowing exactly what to take. You meet the group at the airport and they are friendly, but everyone is unsure of how things will go. Will everyone like each other? Will the tour guides make decisions that benefit all the members of the tour? Will the trip be a great memory and a big success? Doesn't that describe how it feels when you meet a family for the first time? Any trip or journey requires taking a small but significant risk and adapting to circumstances that arise. Learning about family advocacy and family belief systems allows participants like you to achieve a much higher level of competency and effectiveness in a much shorter period of time.
Families benefit because intervention takes place over a shorter time period, and they learn to trust professionals, building healthy relationships with those whom they need in order to achieve their goals- not your goals, but theirs! You, as a professional, are able to improve the quality of your interactions with families. Even more importantly, you become aware of a new field of intervention that can change the way you think about working with families. It is community family advocacy.
Community family advocacy: To begin work on this chapter, you will need to think back to your high school writing workshops, and recall the skills of reflection and revision. Reflect on how you talk to families. Have you ever told a parent or family member that their concerns and issues were going to be your intervention goals? Are you able to revise your thinking as an "expert" to accommodate the definition of community family advocacy?
A community family advocate acquires knowledge of programs, resource links, collaborations and existing services, and partners with families to find (not refer) appropriate matches to family goals, issues, concerns and priorities. Your job becomes one of understanding how different professional disciplines, as well as different ethnic, racial, and religious cultures, view children. The universal task of a community family advocate is to gain knowledge of a worldview. Different parts of the world treat children and infants differently. Many cultures are not concerned with the environment, personality or the higher priority in our culture, treating children well. Around the world and around every town, children's needs and family styles of parenting and caring for their children are mini-ecospheres, mini-societies.
So how can we work effectively and smartly with families when the families themselves vary so widely? Increasingly, families fall into broad categories of universal normality. Secondly, all communities have increasingly complex and varied program options and choices, collaborations and service models. Families cannot go it alone. They need professionals, who also are community family advocates, to take them on that journey, that tour we talked about at the beginning of the chapter.
To put it another way, community family advocates work within this worldview. They acknowledge that each family has a system-one that has unique patterns, cycles, attitudes, superstitions and beliefs. This is a big idea upon which to reflect. Can you accommodate your thinking to advocacy, a worldview, and fit this new thinking into your particular professional expertise?
Family belief systems: What is a family belief system? It is really "family dynamics," and it has a long and prestigious research history. It has been scientifically studied as a process encompassing cycles of generations, traditions, superstitions, and contrasting ethnicity. Such events as birth, marriage, divorce or separation, war, conflict, peace, union, sexual attitudes, mores and preference, ages and races are integrated and interwoven into family dynamics, even yours.
The interweaving process, in which families and their children progress through stages of development in an orderly fashion, is incredibly human. Think about your own family belief system. Is it complicated? All families are complicated. They are a normal composite of good times and bad habits, functional periods and dysfunctional episodes, prejudices, preferences and plenty of interesting characters.
Draw your family tree! Even if you just go back two generations, map them out. Go to the trouble of adding circles to represent friends, jobs, relatives, organizations, commitments and activities, and you will see what complex interweaving processes go on in your life! It's a real eye-opener to professionals, regardless of how long they have been in the business of helping families! How does your own family belief system influence your expectations of how families you know professionally "should" fix their problems? Are you guilty of thinking that all parents want for their children what you think is important-independence, self-esteem, success in school, a job? It is natural, but faulty, to assume that others share our personal family belief system. Isn't it better to understand one family as a complete "family system" and partner with that family to meet their needs? Read these worldviews of children and it will help you to become the community family advocate you need to be!
A psychosocial worldview of children: Social scientists and psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists view the early effects of the home environment on childcare and child development as significant. Others find in their research that every child and family has its own ecosystem. Some families talk as their method of getting their way and solving their problems. Others are physical, and still others move within closed family circles, excluding outsiders. Still other families are joiners, always moving about the community, making connections and finding their way. Other scientists look at parental love, personal interactions and even neighborhood characteristics as determinates of a child's capacity to love, develop healthy emotional lives, flourish and thrive. The vast majority of parents successfully love and nurture their young, even in neglected neighborhoods. Many avoid violence and gangs, and children still succeed in schools that are literally falling down around them.
This psychosocial worldview is based on a theory that children go through a series of crises in childhood, which they resolve. Adults also strive to resolve crises as they mature. It is a useful conceptualization of how children grow and develop. In this view, attachment, autonomy, basic trust and security are necessary, regardless of the environment or genetics, for optimal development through the life span. Children are viewed as developing persons who manage to resolve conflicts, issues and concerns throughout life. In the book, The Eight Stages of Man, by Erik Erikson (1962), there are many examples of how this worldview has a dramatic effect upon the life of a developing person. It is a "must read" for every professional and parent because it emphasizes the importance of individual personality traits versus the current emphasis on behavior (and the increasing number of children who are labeled at an early age as having a behavior disorder). We all are, first and foremost, our very own. For good or not so good, we are who we are-we are "all star personalities."
Traits of personality and temperament have been found in child development studies to be extraordinarily stable over time. This stability makes temperament and personality inventories and scales useful for professionals from all fields of expertise. Identify a temperament scale through an online search, and use it as an effective observational planning tool. It will clarify for you the difference between behavioral traits (learned and acquired habits, both good and bad) and normal traits that make up "who we are."
Take a moment to name a few temperamental and constitutional traits that remind you of your mother. No kidding! Most of us turn out like our parents, even when we don't want to. Do you or your children look or act like a certain relative? Are they going to grow into a version of an ancestor or like a parent or a grandparent or a distant cousin? What was your personality like as a baby? A toddler? A preschooler? A preadolescent?
In primitive cultures and modern ones, too, infants are people, not possessions. An infant can be shy, picky, fussy, talkative, or restless, and those traits persist. Toddlers can be either dependent or independent, restrained or feeling free from the moment of birth. In many third world cultures infants are carried for more than two years, but they still show their mobility by kicking and heaving from side to side.
A preschooler may like to play alone, or be happier with other people around. A child might have a desire to do things on her own, but in many ethnic groups, grandparents and parents feed and dress a child until he goes to school. Many ethnic groups pay no attention to children's attempts to do things for themselves. Preschoolers are playful and sociable little people, and yet, worldwide, cultural groups do not approve or allow children to play. Some societies ignore child talk, and would not think of chatting with a five-year-old. The idea that children should be seen but never heard exists in many households. Children in many parts of the world are mistreated purposefully and beaten.
If these are common traits of parental behavior, accepted in a specific culture or tradition, community family advocates need to acknowledge these facts. Then they must reflect, and take an aggressive role. This role involves changing what needs to be changed, accepting what does not, and being wise enough to involve parents universally in preventing child abuse, neglect and maltreatment.
A medical worldview of children and families: It is common in this country and in Western Europe to organize community services and care for children and adults around medical ideas, in which diagnosis and treatment models identify deficits, disabilities and symptoms. This view projects the worldview that medical science has the authority and the expertise to "fix" all problems.
The medical view subscribes that families are patients, victims, needy. Medical models persist, as if there were single causes for most illnesses and diseases. More and more researchers find there is rarely a single cause for any medical problem, which is a hopeful sign in the prevention and early intervention of problems either biological or environmental. Some historical ideas continue to "drive" the engine of the medical view:
- Mothers have for centuries been both bearers of the gift of life and the cause of deprivation and deficits among their children.
- Institutional neglect and deprivation causes a loss of attachment, and contributes to deaths in infancy. Seventy years of research has shown that infants in institutions don't thrive, are not secure enough to learn, and do not develop normally through the life span.
- Children who are abused suffer life-long sadness, fear and depression.
- Children are universally at risk.
- Children are inclined to have problems for many years, not just one or two years, following divorce.
- All children have inherent psychological rights.
Modern medical research shows all children born today are universally at risk.
Universal risk categories are helpful to know, so that professionals can help ALL CHILDREN pass securely through the stages of infancy, older childhood, preadolescence and young adulthood. The questions associated with each category of risk may be helpful, if you remember there are always positive interventions and help for families who find their child fits into any of these categories.
- Biological risk: Is there a history of prenatal, perinatal, or neonatal developmental events suggestive of biological insult(s) to the developing central nervous system which may lead to delayed development? For example, a child is born prematurely, or an infant's development is delayed due to alcohol or drug abuse (by either the mother or the father) during the prenatal period.
- Established risk: Is there a high likelihood of early abnormal development related to diagnosed genetic/medical disorders? For example, an infant is born with Down syndrome, Tay Sachs disease, or any other genetic disorder that is now identifiable before birth. There are more than 70 genetic abnormalities that can be identified before birth.
- Environmental risk: Are there early environmental experiences that are limiting and may lead to delayed development? For example, an infant may fail to thrive due to neglect, malnutrition, or intake of toxic materials, or a child may be injured or abused or suffer a traumatic experience. Remember the toddler, called Jessica, who was trapped in a well for 5 days before being rescued?
A mind-body-brain worldview: Last, but not least by a long shot, a new and exciting worldview of children is emerging, called the mind-body-brain connection worldview. It is gaining in popularity due to technological advances in diagnostic techniques, such as imaging. Some researchers have shown apparent neural connections in the infant brain that are "hardwired," and seem to be completely mature at birth! They theorize that the brain divides at the embryonic stage into different areas responsible for different kinds of intelligence. However, most studies show that no centers for any brain function are established at birth and that the brain is plastic and capable of spontaneous recovery from neurological insults during the early years. Researchers who think the brain is blank at birth, waiting for the mind to become active and trigger intellectual or mental activity, also suggest infants are born as dependent, reflexive, passive blobs, mindlessly reacting to sights and sounds, lacking any ability to think. Most studies of infant gaze, motion and movement, postural changes, sounds, cry and sensory states conclude that babies are smarter than we ever imagined.
The "Smart Baby" researchers study behaviors that demonstrate an extraordinary human capacity for adaptation and spontaneous recovery from trauma, and conclude that infants are early organizers and active learners from birth and even in the womb. Infancy and childhood studies are moving from psychological perspectives (which are still important) into neuroscience and biology, in order to examine the effects of sensory stimulation in new ways. All infants and children need sensory stimulation, or they do not flourish and grow.
What do you think about the mind-brain connection? Research shows that the mind and the brain work in perfect harmony with the body throughout the life span. The research points to the fact that people of all ages are increasingly able to demonstrate they are biologically and psychologically equipped with significant abilities to recover from stress and illness, and a much more developed capacity for prolonged periods of health.
Life span perspective on family life: Studies from the field of Sports Physiology are showing dramatic changes in adaptation over a fifty-year span. The development of the human body from infancy to old age is no longer viewed as static, "fossilized" or degenerative. Newly identified inner resources we do not fully understand are being clinically investigated, as more and more older people are retaining health, literally healing themselves, and finding new talents and skills in old age.
Think about life span options, and do another practice exercise. Rehabilitative and medical investigations show evidence of environmental and genetic predisposition's to regaining use of faculties and body functions. It is as if each person is the "producer" of her/his own developmental "self!" When do you remember beginning to think and recall events in your life? Write a first person baby "bio" about yourself. You can also click on the "Let me introduce myself" button each month for a story of a specific-age child.
Using your new skills: If you are now an expert on community family advocacy, you are also getting better at listening. I can prove to you what a wonderful and practically perfect professional you have become after reading this chapter! Listen to a radio or TV talk show host who has radically different political views from your own. Do this without speaking or turning the remote to another channel or station. See, you are suddenly able to "take in" what you think is crazy or "off the mark" talk, without judging the person. You are suddenly non-judgmental in your role of providing guidance or counseling.
This important skill helps you advocate for families in the community. You must listen without talking, because you cannot accommodate a family's worldview of itself, unless you really hear their story, without inflicting your own point of view. Reflect on the fact that the TV host may represent (to you) a "problem" attitude or belief, but the host's words tell you what he thinks is his issue. De-personalize the information you hear; reflect on how you can frame a positive belief statement about the attitude expressed, even if it is radically different from your own. This skill is essential when you are involved with families whose life styles and background are radically different from yours.
As we conclude the discussion and practice on family belief systems, it's time to ask questions about your approach to family advocacy. Do not avoid this self-study task, because all the knowledge of worldviews and family beliefs you have received will not change family interactions unless you take this time to reflect.
How do you intend to advocate for families and help them advocate for themselves?
· How will you talk to family members to identify family concerns?
· Would drawing a family tree help you understand family beliefs and traits better?
· Do families go through stages of development, as well as children?
· Does the idea of universal risk mean you have to assemble resources and make them available to all families?
· Would a health and wellness worldview facilitate family advocacy activities?
Summary: As a review of family belief systems and community family advocacy, here are a few key points to remember:
- The helping professional, YOU, does not assign judgment or blame for family traits, issues, concerns or beliefs, because no one risk or family systems factor can be isolated as the causal factor.
- There are multiple causes for family problems, leading YOU, as the professional, to assume there are multiple options for problem solving. There is no one cause, and no one solution
- YOU will emphasize the strengths of each person from now on, rather than focusing on family weaknesses. Problems to be targeted for change are identified as situations to be resolved.
- Professionals and family members, addressing behaviors that must change, will write out a specific replacement plan, revising as often as possible.
See you next time!
Susan
Chapter IV - Abuse and Neglect
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