Facilitating parental change

Assessment in all shapes and forms, should be the starting point of our work with children and families. Often there is a gap between how things currently are and how things need to be; this inevitably involves change. An essential part of the assessment process is making a judgement about a parent/carer’s capacity to change to respond to their child’s needs.

As practitioners, we need to understand whether families; parents/carers in particular, can make the changes required. Change needs to be achieved within the child’s timeframe, as delay can lead to long term harm and poor outcomes, particularly for younger children.

The following resources will provide guidance in relation to “Facilitating Parental Change”:

• Capacity to change - This presentation sets out the steps to assessing and promoting change and maintenance of change in our work with families
• Working with resistance and challenges - This document provides guidance on how to deal with resistance and challenge
• Cycle of change diagram - This document provides a diagram of the change process
• Evoking change questions - This document sets out some of the questions that you might want to use to evoke change.