Direct Work with Family Groups is full of great ideas to aid engagement, assessment and enable positive change through direct work with family groups.

Working with families can be a challenging experience. This book looks at the personal skills needed to engage families, both at home and in the community. It provides guidance on how to assess and manage the needs of individual family members, whilst also being mindful of potential risk factors. With easy to use activities and resources, this book will inspire you to think about creative new ways to plan and carry out your work.

Based on tried and tested techniques, this is a must-have for social workers and social work students, as well as child protection workers, therapists, counsellors and child and family centre workers. It is the perfect complement to Direct Work with Vulnerable Children, also by the same authors.

Contents:

• 1. Introduction.
• 2. The First Home Visit.
• 3. Keeping Yourself Safe.
• 4. What to Do if You Don’t Get Access: The Client Refuses to Open the Door.
• 5. Once in the Door.
• 6. Working with Resistance, Challenging Behaviour and Aggression.
• 7. Using Praise.
• 8. Getting Started.
• 9. The Bag.
• 10. Activities to Support Engagement.
• 11. Activities to Aid Assessment and/or Help with ‘Big conversations’.
• 12. Simple Ideas to Increase Parent/Child Proximity and Positive Touch.
• 13. Behaviour.
• 14. Storytelling.
• 15. Endings.

Author Bio:

Audrey Tait is a Social Worker with the Children and Families Practice Team, City of Edinburgh Council. Originally trained as a nursery nurse, she has 20 years’ experience working with children in social work settings and for the past 4 years she has been delivering a training course, Communicating with Children, for the City of Edinburgh Council’s Children and Families Department.

Helen Wosu is an independent social worker and holds an MSc in Advanced Social Work Practice from the University of Edinburgh. She has previously worked as a Teaching Fellow at the University of Dundee, a senior social worker for a practice team and as an Employee Development Officer in Child Protection for the City of Edinburgh Council. She currently undertakes kinship care and adoption assessments as well as child development and child protection training