Relationships here, there and everywhere: How they work and why they matter

1. Relationships here, there and everywhere: How they work and why they matter Gillian Ruch University of Sussex BASW World Social Work Day 2019

2. The resurgence of the relationship Coming together, being together, coming apart (Bowlby,1979) There is no such thing a baby… (Winnicott, 1968) Individual and structural (Ruch et al, 2018; Featherstone et al, 2018)

3. Beginnings

4. Bye-Child Seamus Heaney He was discovered in the hen-house where she had confined him. He was incapable of saying anything. When the lamp glowed, A yolk of light In their back window, The child in the outhouse Put his eye to a chink- Little henhouse boy, Sharp-faced as new moons Remembered, your photo still Glimpsed like a rodent On the floor of my mind, Little moon man, Kennelled and faithful At the foot of the yard, Your frail shape, luminous, Weightless, is stirring the dust, The cobwebs, old droppings Under the roosts And dry smells from scraps She put through your trapdoor Morning and evening. After those footsteps, silence; Vigils, solitudes, fasts, Unchristened tears, A puzzled love of the light. But now you speak at last With a remote mime Of something beyond patience, Your gaping wordless proof of lunar distances Travelled beyond love.

5. Middles: Talking and Listening to Children Paradoxical pedagogy

6. Being paradoxically courageous and compassionate • Think the unthinkable • Authoritative empathy • Discrete intrusion • Doubtful trust • Hopeful realism • Vulnerable competence

7. Paradoxical positions and professional relationships Working with a family where there were concerns re: neglect of a 5 year old girl with cerebral palsy and her two year old brother, the social worker displays her doubtful trust: I say ‘appear’ open, as opposed to they are open, you don’t ever really know… In response to a mother with a young baby: Right now she’s doing a good job but there’s always the worry that you close the case and it all kicks off again, I mean we have we’ve been here before like. A social worker working with a mother with an 8 month old baby boy in light of serious concerns about her parenting capacity demonstrates her authoritatively empathic response: Because the first visit she was very anxious and she sat and cried. She goes, ‘I don’t want you to take him off me’. And I was kind of saying, ‘You know Kathryn, we do do that when we need to, but I’m not coming out to do that today. What I’m out to do is to help you.’ Visiting a 5 year old boy where there were child protection concerns, the social worker demonstrates her position of discrete intrusion, mindful of not causing distress and keeping her visit reallybrief: But I think I’m also conscious that I don’t want to ask them too sort of heavy specific questions …let me have a conversation with him but as I said I don’t want it to be too formal with him. It’ll be a really brief visit, I would imagine with Danny. Following a school visit to see a 5 year old girl: Yes, I found it like it was a, it was…yeah it was a good visit, you know, I don’t think I’ve left her with any sort of trauma or distress. But when are encounters too discrete or too intrusive, too doubting or too trusting, too authoritative or too empathic?

8. Social pedagogy and professional relationships Maggie comes through and says that we are ready to go and I get my things. She grabs the box of Lego and says that she is planning on making bracelets but she thinks maybe Carly might want to play with Lego. As we walk across to the car she says she always carries lots of things around with her as she is thinking what might they like to do which is going to help them trust her and to feel comfortable. She opens her car-boot and there are puppets and toys and boxes with paper in them in there. I say that I haven’t seen a social worker with that amount of toys and things before and she says that she can’t imagine how people go about talking to children without them. We get into the car.

9. Endings: The Four Quartets, T.S.Eliot In my beginning is my end. We had the experience but missed the meaning We shall not cease from explorationAnd the end of all our exploringWill be to arrive where we startedAnd know the place for the first time We need to become less of a human doing and more of a human being