ABSTRACT
Chapter 15 is about working thoughtfully and sensitively with vulnerable parents, in the context of everyday school-based meetings. Teachers, inclusion managers and head teachers will see parents anyway, as needed and sometimes on a regular basis. Some schools have parent workers and all schools have staff with responsibility for looked-after children who will often see parents regularly.
Work with vulnerable and disturbed children is so much more effective if we can engage with the parents at the same time. We all know how children’s problems can be intricately interlinked with, and even caused by the unmet needs and unprocessed hurts of their parents. The task is to break that cycle, and slowly point parents in the direction of appropriate help.
But often engaging such parents is tricky. A thoughtful, secure, relationship-based approach, which survives the ups and downs, may be needed by vulnerable parents too!
The bulk of the chapter is taken up with an extended case study illustrating the benefits of such a sensitive relationship-based approach. It also illustrates how the nurture base feeds into this work by inviting the parent to join in on a regular basis.
