Support for the Family by the
Multi-Agency Team

In a nutshell guide:

Neglect can often be characterised by a lack of social support. Therefore, always consider options for (wider) family, community and organisational support. Community options should include through links with local community services, charities and groups.
Your skills and values as a worker are key to effective support. This includes: your capacities to listen to and engage with families and their avenues of support. A desire to support families who are struggling, identifying strengths as well as difficulties. An ability to support with both immediate and longer-term needs.
Instilling hope can be very important, supporting families to believe in and achieve positive changes.
Neglect can often involve the need for working with families on a longer-term basis, especially in cases of chronic neglect. Interventions need to be multi-faceted, to address the range of needs families are presenting with.
Neglect therefore requires collective responses and collaborative inter-agency working, sometimes over periods of years.

Moran (2009) (https://www.basw.co.uk/system/files/resources/basw_43707-5_0.pdf) suggests on pages 13-22:

Research evidence regarding ‘what works’ in preventing or reducing neglect and its adverse outcomes is relatively sparse…However, it is possible to set out the characteristics of interventions that are most likely to succeed from evidence of what appears to be at the very least ‘promising’…

Long-term support

There is not likely to be a ‘quick fix’ remedy available. Therefore services working with neglectful families must recognise the need to work with some families on a long-term basis. Long-term professional commitment may also contribute to the building of more secure family attachments…Services need to be aware of and make provision for a proportion of families for whom prolonged involvement with professional help is necessary for lasting solutions.

Multi-faceted support

Given the long list of factors potentially contributing to neglect, approaches are required that intervene at multiple levels, influencing individual, family and social systems. Interventions are therefore more likely to succeed if they are multi-faceted, tackling multiple risk factors. Packages of care may include a combination of interventions addressing a range of needs, such as mental health issues and parenting skills as well as increasing social support and housing needs.

Early as well as late support

Interventions can be described as ‘early’ or ‘late’ both in relation to the timing of the intervention relative to a child’s age and in relation to the stage in development of the problem to be addressed. In relation to children’s age, there is a need for intervention across childhood, as neglect can occur at any time from infancy to teenage years (Howarth, 2007)…In relation to the stage in development of the problem, ‘early’ and ‘late’ interventions may also be required. In this context, ‘early’ refers to primary initiatives aimed at prevention of difficulties, and can involve universal service provision such as prenatal care and health visiting. ‘Early’ may also involve secondary interventions that tackle difficulties in their early stages, such as services aimed at isolated families or withdrawn children… ‘Late’ interventions also play a role, and involve tertiary levels of provision that target difficulties at severe, entrenched or crisis levels. These services can involve provision from specialist agencies such as child and adolescent health teams and statutory social services involvement.

Consider protective factors as well as risk factors

Interventions also need to consider how to bolster individual and family strengths and resources in order to build child and adult resilience…In relation to neglect, providing opportunities to develop supportive relationships is important, and may influence building secure attachments and enhancing self-worth and self-efficacy. Horwath (2007) suggests provision of a support figure in cases of neglect, and this can arise from a positive childcare, nursery or school environment where staff may provide for the emotional and social needs of the child…Providing isolated parents with opportunities for social support, as well as positive relationships with professionals, may also serve a protective function for parents.

Parent/carer friendly support

Parents’ feelings of mistrust and of being blamed can reduce the success of an intervention, and such feelings are often present in neglectful families’ dealings with services. Professionals need to be skilled in working empathically, respectfully, and in partnership with families, rather than being seen as doing things to families (Forehand and Kotchik, 2002). Intervention from statutory services in particular can be experienced as a threat to parents or carers. Buckley (2005) suggests that services offered by agencies outside the statutory system may be seen as more ‘friendly’, and can form part of a package of support if there are clear lines of accountability and contracting arrangements.

Involve fathers as well as mothers

Parenting interventions often fail to take into account that parents can be male as well as female…This unfortunate exclusion of fathers from the issue of neglect ‘ignores the potential risks that men can pose to children and also misses the opportunity to build on what fathers and paternal extended families may offer children’ (Daniel and Taylor, 2005: 263).

Include a focus on attachment

In a discussion of attachment-based interventions for working with families in cases of neglect and abuse, Howe (2005) cites four different points of focus for interventions. These involve enhancing parents’ sensitivity and responsiveness to their infant by changing parenting behaviour; changing parents’ working model/mental representation of relationships through increasing insight and reflective capacity; providing enhanced social support for parents; and improving maternal mental health and wellbeing.

Social network interventions

A characteristic of neglectful families is their social isolation. Social network interventions aim to extend and strengthen social support available to these families… The intervention itself can involve use of five specific social network interventions in combination with professional case work/management, including advocacy and brokering of formal services…

Personal networking – involving direct intervention to enhance existing relationships and potential relationships with family, relatives, neighbours or work associates.
Establishing mutual aid groups – aiming to teach parenting and social skills, and develop problem-solving ability and enhance self-esteem
Volunteer linking – involving use of trained volunteers to carry out tasks similar to family aides
Recruiting neighbours as informal help – they are paid a small amount and receive support and guidance from social workers
Social skills training – aimed at overcoming skills deficits that may interfere with formation of supportive relationships

The Children’s Bureau (2019) (Chronic Child Neglect (childwelfare.gov)) helpfully suggest on pages 4-11:

Community-based child abuse prevention and differential response are two approaches that can be used to address chronic neglect. Community-based prevention and early intervention services (e.g., family support, home visiting, etc.) can help keep families from becoming chronically involved with child welfare…. The importance of providing families with early intervention services before a pattern of chronic neglect develops cannot be overemphasized…Community and multisystem partnerships can help to create a holistic response to chronic neglect and a multidisciplinary approach to engaging and supporting more families.

It is imperative for caseworkers to demonstrate the following skills and strategies when working with families dealing with chronic neglect (Kaplan, Schene, DePanfilis, & Gilmore, 2009):

Ability to engage families and their support systems holistically
Well-honed risk assessment and decision-making skills, including a recognition of patterns of neglect
An understanding of the role of hope and how to inspire it in struggling families
Ability to help families sustain positive changes before closing a case.

Caseworkers can do the following to engage the family:

Listen to and address issues that concern the family while identifying and attending to their immediate needs
Identify family strengths and networks of support within the community to address the identified concerns
Focus initially on “baby steps” (small actions that lead to immediate improvements in the parent’s life and the child’s life) and avoid overwhelming the family with too many services at once
Focus on improving the capacity of family members to meet their basic needs and improve child and family safety and well-being
Recognize and praise parents’ strengths, especially examples of sensitivity to and concern for children in the family
Return to the home regularly to develop a relationship with the caregiver and to evaluate the family’s progress over time.

Casework interventions should seek to empower caregivers by providing them with choices whenever possible and engaging them in the decision-making process.

When families and caregivers have hope, they are more likely to work toward case goals and achieve safety, wellbeing, and permanency. It is essential for caseworkers to motivate families through an optimistic and strength-based approach so that they engage in services and work toward positive goals. Child welfare professionals can support families by helping cultivate positive relationships, experiences, and environments…

Support for the Family by the Multi-Agency Team