ABSTRACT
This chapter talks about young child’s emotional journey through a year in transition and explores how he tried to maintain his relationships and manage the pain of separation. For all families who have just been separated and children placed in local authority care, this is a very bewildering and distressing time. Arrangements for children to see their parents in a supervised setting are usually made as soon as possible. At a first meeting, when contact arrangements are explained, parents are often experiencing feelings of shock, anger, confusion, denial, and powerlessness. The contact worker role is supervisory, supportive and observational. For the supervised family, being observed under constraints of time and location can feel very difficult. While Paul experienced the numerous changes of routine and transitioned daily between caregivers and locations, the author observed how his relationship with Thomas the Tank Engine grew from an ordinary interest into something more obsessive.
