ABSTRACT
This paper describes various roles that professional child care practitioners can have in their work with families. The paper reviews changes in child care which increasingly necessitate work with families. Theoretically, the paper emphasizes how the family approach can be integrated with ecological and systems perspectives, how preventive approaches can involve families, and how parents can be involved in a variety of educational and therapeutic programs.
I see my role as adult, parent, peer and therapist. It is interchangeable. It depends on the situation, on the child, on anything.
Child care worker (Rathbun et al 1981)Child care workers are therefore increasingly finding themselves working with parents to help the parents learn how to be more effective with their children, rather than working with children themselves … it seems apparent that this will be a major part of the job in the future.
Jerome Beker (1973)