Supporting children’s relationships with trusted adults and actively addressing caregivers’ experience of deprivation can lead to improved wellbeing and outcomes for children who have contact with social care, an international group of social work and clinical educators, practitioners, and attachment researchers has said.
The group proposes a new approach to how attachment theory, one of the core theories for applied social work, is used by social workers. It calls for an update in the curriculum for trainee social workers that mirrors the newer developments in attachment theory research and avoids misinterpretation of concepts or the repetition of myths.
The paper, published in Social Work Education, outlines eight new ‘core concepts’ about the relationship between a child and their caregivers, including the concepts of adult caregivers as a child’s ‘safe haven’ and ‘security base’ whose presence allows children to seek safety when hurt or alarmed, and explore and learn when feeling safe.
It shifts the focus for practitioners from a child’s behaviour to their adult caregivers’ situation and actions, such as being attentive and receptive to the child’s needs or exhibiting behaviour that can be alarming or stressful for a child, such as symptoms of trauma.
Crucially, the paper calls for recognition of external factors that affect a caregiver’s stability and emotional availability for the child, such as poor mental health, poverty, and other socio-economic factors, to be addressed by the social workers supporting the child.
It also argues against a number of practices that can be harmful to children, such as judging oppressed groups against the implicit parenting standards of dominant majorities, the wrong belief that children need to be categorised by practitioners into specific attachment classifications, or the use of attachment disorganisation or attachment disorders to identify maltreatment.
The Government’s social care reforms aim to ensure loving care for children that need support - and this research aims to help inform that process. Social workers need the best tools available to make sure the children and families they work with can thrive.
This new piece of research will help improve training standards for social workers and other practitioners who work with children in social care, using a holistic approach to the factors affecting children’s safety and development and their caregivers’ behaviour and circumstances.
We urge trainers and existing social workers to consider this new approach in their practice and for policy makers to help ensure and enable its uptake
Dustin Hutchinson
Senior Policy and Public Affairs Manager at the National Children’s Bureau and co-author of the paper
Attachment theory is a familiar part of the curriculum for social care practitioners. But what is taught is often decades out of date, or based on unrepresentative single studies. There have been major revolutions in attachment research since the 1990s. The consensus statement has emerged from dialogue about these new findings among researchers, practitioners, educators and the charity sector, thinking together carefully and critically about what the new knowledge implies for social work practice and social work education.
Dr Robbie Duschinsky
Professor of Social Science and Health at the University of Cambridge and co-author of the paper