The Helping Relationship Between Social Workers and Mothers in Child Care: What Do We Know? (WITHDRAWN)

Background and Purpose:

The helping relationship is a fundamental pillar in social work practice, hence an important concept to be explored and unpacked. The importance of the helping relationship and its complexity are well documented in social work scholarship. The purpose of this comprehensive review is to shed light on what is known about the relationship between social workers and clients who are mothers in the context of child welfare. A comprehensive understanding of the helping relationship between workers and mothers is a significant step in enhancing practitioners’ and policy-makers’ ability to acknowledge the importance and meet the complexity of helping relationships between social workers and their core clientele of women who are mothers.

Methods:

This comprehensive review is based on a systematic exploration of peer-reviewed scholarship in English. Relevant scholarship was identified by using the main data bases in the social sciences: ProQuest Central, Social Work Abstracts, Social Services Abstracts (ProQuest), Sociological Abstracts (ProQuest), Campbell Collaboration Library of Systematic Reviews, Web of Science. The following key words were used to extract the relevant scholarship from data bases: social work-er / mother-hood-ing / parent-hood-ing / female / women / welfare recipient / welfare reliant / service user / social welfare / welfare / relationship / helping relationship / professional relationship / encounter / interaction / child welfare / child protection / youth protection. The searches were conducted during March-April 2015.

Inclusion criteria included a description of an empirical study that examined any aspect of the helping relationship between social workers and parents in the context of child welfare. Eventually 65 empirical studies were included: 47 qualitative, 9 mixed-methods, and 9 quantitative.

All articles were documented according to a set of a categories: country where data were collected; number of citations on Google Scholar; research goal; method; participants; data collection; data analysis; main results; recommendations / conclusions; authors' acknowledged limitation; theoretical / conceptual framework. 

Results:

What is known about the relationship between social workers and clients who are mothers in the context of child welfare is organized into various themes: Challenges to the helping relationship; Power in the helping relationship; Workers’ skills, attitudes, and qualities that promote good helping relationships. It is evident that the ‘nature’ of the helping relationship is extremely complex and diverse, yet it plays a central role in promoting desired outcomes for the clients.

Conclusions and Implications:

While scholars tend to use the term ‘parents’ to describe their studies’ participants, the overwhelmingly majority are mothers. Hence, most of the reviewed scholarship speaks of the relationship between social workers and mothers, but the ways gender and motherhood intersect and shape the relationship is silenced and invisible.

Also, while various challenges to the helping relationship have been explored, the ways in which the aggregation of the social, professional, organizational, and institutional challenges to the helping relationship affect the everyday experiences of social workers and clients have been neglected. These gaps in knowledge carry significant implications for social work practice, research and policy that will be unpacked in the presentation.