The Social Work Assessment Of Parenting

British Journal of Social Work (2003) 33, 87–106

The Social Work Assessment of
Parenting: An Exploration
Johanna Woodcock
Johanna Woodcock is Senior Lecturer in Social Work at the University of Plymouth.
Correspondence to Johanna Woodcock, Department of Social Policy and Social Work, University of Plymouth, Drake Circus, Plymouth PL4 8AA, UK.

Summary
The significance of parenting in the conduct of child-care practice is apparent in a range of legal and policy documents emanating from the government. This has been further emphasized in recent years in the refocusing debate emphasizing issues of need and support. While research in childcare has inevitably involved parenting (for example in relation to child protection), and as
However, while these skills were mentioned as a focus for social work attention, their nature, and assessment by practitioners were not the subject of analysis.
More recent research within the broad concerns of child protection has given way to a formulation, to a considerable degree, around a common theme of a concern for family support as a response to need (Aldgate and Bradley, 2000; Brandon et al.,
1999; Aldgate and Tunstill, 2000; Thoburn et al., 2000). Aldgate and Bradley
(2000), for example, focus on accommodation as a family support service, while both Brandon et al. (1999) and Thoburn et al. (2000) focused on the level and type of intervention and the integration or balancing of family support and child protection. Aldgate and Tunstill (2000) focused directly on services provided for family support, specifically excluding child protection cases.

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As with the earlier studies, however, although parenting inevitably formed an aspect of the research, this did not include the social workers’ construction of parenting. Thus, while Aldgate and Bradley (2000) show family support was used to deal with broad categories of parenting difficulties, they did not make the
. . the point I was making was that the people left in charge . . . that somehow the services were called out because there were problems, so clearly they were not suitable. But obviously she thought they were. You know the police were called out a couple of times, there was a fifteen and sixteen-year-old there and there was absolute mayhem.
Researcher: What would she say after that?
Social worker: Well, she’d say it was okay, and I felt that she was desperate to go out twice a week, that was her time to herself, which you could understand . . .
Right no problem. The problem was who she was leaving in charge . . . The fact that she needed a break, who wouldn’t?

A second dimension of social workers’ developmental concerns was where a delay in growth and development was a result of parenting deemed not good enough.
Playing with the child could be a key factor.
Social worker: She’s [child] not being helped. To her, [mother] discipline was important. She didn’t feel things like teaching the child, helping the child play with toys, things like that, were not important things. The child could