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The participation of families in poverty situations in research on child and family social work: learning from a Belgian social work research project
3. Motivation
The context for our ambition as researchers to work in participative ways with families, especially parents in poverty situations, stemmed from the acknowledgement that the individual responsibility of parents has increasingly been emphasised within a so-called 'parenting turn'. We see this as indicative of a climate characterised by explicit and implicit attempts to control and regulate the conduct of parents, particularly poor parents (Gillies, 2005; Lister, 2006). In the vein of a social investment paradigm, the child is positioned as the central object of intervention, which "divorces children's welfare from that of their parents" (Lister, 2006, p. 315-316). Poor parents are frequently portrayed "as making bad spending decisions and transmitting their attitudes and behaviours to their children" (Main & Bradshaw, 2015, p. 38). Parents have historically been treated as 'incapable' and 'underserving' because they are deemed responsible for dealing with the structural circumstances in which their children live. In contrast, their children are treated as victims of their parents (Goldson, 2002).
These trends in policies and popular perceptions of causes of poverty motivated us to subject them to critical scrutiny. We decided to invite parents in families in poverty situations to participate in our research project. We included their life knowledge through conducting family history research as the basis to identify which social work interventions they experienced as meaningful for their mobility out of poverty (see Schiettecat et al., 2016).
Reference:
Schiettecat, T., Roets, G., Vandenbroeck, M. (2017). What families in poverty consider supportive: welfare strategies of parents with young children in relation to (child and family) social work. Child & Family Social Work, 22(2), 689-699.
Jacquet, N., Van Haute, D., Schiettecat, T., Roets, G. (2022). Stereotypes, conditions, and binaries: analysing processes of social disqualification towards children and parents living in poverty. British Journal of Social Work Stereotypes, conditions and binaries: Analysing processes of social disqualification towards children and parents living in precarity | The British Journal of Social Work | Oxford Academic (oup.com)