"I Don't Want a New Worker. Where's My Old Worker?": Relationship Disruptions between Young People and Their Child Welfare Professionals

Background:  This study explored disruptions between young people and workers in an independent living program. The relationships young people build with child welfare professionals have the potential to be therapeutic and promote positive youth outcomes. Unfortunately, however, relationship disruptions between young people and workers are common in child welfare given the high rates of turnover and staffing changes. These disruptions are problematic and may prevent the formation of long-lasting and potentially healing relationships for young people who already have a considerable history of maltreatment and relational loss. Little is known about the impact of the professional relationship disruptions youth experience in the child welfare system, even though they represent a potentially re-traumatizing process on a young person’s emotional and relational development.

Methods:  This 2-year, longitudinal study used in-depth, semi-structured interviews and participant observation with 33 participants (17 young adults ages 19-20, 12 workers, 4 administrators) to explore the effects and processes of relationship disruptions in an independent living program.  Interviews explored participants’ unique views on relationship-building, their thoughts about and responses to relationship-disruptions, and their understanding of how organizational factors impacted the disruptions.  Participant observation occurred several days a week throughout the process of day-to-day activities (e.g., home visits, staff meetings), allowing the researcher to triangulate views expressed in interviews with behaviors displayed in practice.  Interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim.  Data from interviews and participant observations were coded in 3-phases (i.e., open-coding, focused-coding, theoretical-coding) using a grounded theory approach to qualitative data analysis.

Findings:  The agency experienced considerable staffing changes and worker turnover, both of which disrupted relationships between youth and staff.  These multiple relationship disruptions affected young peoples’ emotional and relational well-being in a variety of complex ways.  Workers made assumptions about their relationships with clients, and like their clients, also experienced emotional responses to the relationship disruptions. These assumptions and emotional responses were found to influence how they ended their relationships with clients by either creating a barrier to processing the ending (i.e., processing barriers) or facilitating a space for processing the ending (i.e., processing facilitators).  “Processing barriers” included approaches that unintentionally avoided, minimized, or reframed the young client’s experience of the ending. “Processing facilitators,” included approaches that acknowledged, validated, and explored the young client’s experience of the ending.

Implications:  This study provides new information about the effects of professional relationship disruptions on young people in child welfare, as well as how their workers thought about and ended those relationships in the moment. The approaches used by workers provide important insights into the complexity of relationship endings in child welfare. Findings indicate an increased need for training and supervision with workers about the decisions they make when ending relationships with clients including what to say (i.e., content), how to say it (i.e., process), and when, where, and with whom to say it in front of (i.e., context). The study provides client-centered suggestions for taking relationship endings seriously and managing them in a way that minimizes the potentially damaging emotional and relational effects on young people.