Peer-reviewed article
Disrupting the Child Welfare Participation Paradigm: A Contextual, Relational, Embedded and Pragmatic Approach
Jeri L. Damman, Teresa Bertotti, Diletta Mauri, Gillian Ruch, Karen Winter ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This paper examines how children and parents participate in child welfare decision-making, which is legally required but often becomes ineffective or superficial. The authors argue that meaningful participation depends on understanding the context, building strong relationships, and embedding participation into how social workers think and act daily. They introduce psychological and communication frameworks to help practitioners involve children and parents more genuinely and fairly. The paper calls for more research involving children and parents themselves to improve these practices.
Key points
- Legislative requirements for child and parent participation in child welfare often remain rhetorical rather than genuinely implemented
- Context and relationships are central to meaningful participation, not separate from it
- Participation should be understood as a skilled communication process embedded in professionals' everyday practices and mindsets
- Psychoanalytic concepts and pragmatic communication theory offer frameworks for more inclusive and contextual participation
- The authors call for participatory research with children and parents to develop more socially and epistemically just practices
Limitations
This is a conceptual synthesis and narrative review rather than an empirical study, so it cannot provide quantitative evidence about whether specific participatory practices lead to better outcomes for children. It does not evaluate the effectiveness of any particular intervention in practice.
Abstract
ABSTRACT Child and parent participation is fundamental to effective child welfare practice. Legislative imperatives assert the right to participate, but in a child welfare context, participation is complex and risks becoming rhetorical. This paper, based on a conceptual synthesis built from second person action research and a narrative review, explores child and parent participation from a UNCRC rights‐based perspective, adopting a critical reflexive approach to explore challenges and begin to disrupt entrenched and dichotomized child–parent participation practices. Our synthesis positions context and relationships as central to meaningful participation in child welfare, embeds participatory acts in the everyday mindsets and practices of professionals and positions participation as a skilled communication process. Psychoanalytic concepts and the Pragmatics of Human Communication are introduced as generative conceptual frames, offering an innovative reconceptualization of participation that is more inclusive, contextual, relational, embedded and pragmatic. We conclude with a call for participatory research involving children and parents that might offer new insights and mobilize practitioners into more attuned and epistemically and socially just participatory practices.