 Assessing parental capacity to change: The missing jigsaw piece in the assessment of a child's welfare?Dendy Platt and Katie Riches Children and Youth Services Review, 2016, vol. 61, issue C, 141-148 Abstract: This paper presents a framework for assessing parental capacity to change, for use by social workers when a child is experiencing significant harm or maltreatment. It reports on part of the work of a knowledge exchange project involving the University of Bristol and three local authorities in South West England. The availability of assessment models addressing capacity to change, in both social work practice and the academic literature, was found to be limited. At the same time, the importance of such an assessment is significant, in terms of the lives of children affected. Two particular approaches were examined, the assessment of actual attempts to change parenting behaviour, and how behaviour change theory can help understand barriers or facilitators to change such as individual motivation, or habits and automatic responses. The development of an assessment approach is outlined, based on these two key features. It is argued that this type of assessment helps fill an important gap in social work theory and practice. Keywords: Child welfare; Child maltreatment; Assessment; Capacity to change; Parent; Behaviour change; Risk (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:cysrev:v:61:y:2016:i:c:p:141-148 DOI: 10.1016/j.childyouth.2015.12.009 Access Statistics for this article Children and Youth Services Review is currently edited by Duncan Lindsey More articles in Children and Youth Services Review from Elsevier |
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