Involving Children in Child Protection Casework

Dr. Andrew Turnell, best known for creating the Signs of Safety with Steve Edwards in the 1990s, presents a useful and practical system for including children in safety planning following violence and neglect in the home.

Safety planning with the Signs of Safety focuses on four questions:

What are we worried about?
What’s working well?
What needs to happen?
What is the risk assessment for the child’s safety at this time (on a 0-10 scale)?

In this video, Dr. Turnell shows how to ask the first three questions in a manner that allows children to open up and talk about their concerns and their hopes for their family.

Utilizing the imagery of “three houses,” and borrowing from Maori culture, he describes the process of having even very young children draw a “house of worries,” a “house of good things,” and a “house of dreams.” In each house the child draws what they aren’t always able to say. The social worker’s job is to ask questions supporting the child throughout the process. Even the coached child, or the child who has been told to remain silent, is still engageable through this process as the focus is not fully on the negatives and worries, but also on what is already going well. It is recommended that the social worker takes the caregivers through this process prior to meeting with the child in order to decrease the family’s resistance.

Many social workers have expressed that the “breakthrough” moment with some very hard-to-connect-with families comes from sharing the child’s drawings—with their permission, of course—with the parents. The “three houses” tool gives the parents a glimpse into how their behavior is affecting their children—and this is often a strong motivating factor for change.

Turnell works toward the same results using the “fairy and the wizard” tools. Both help connect with the child in playful and developmentally appropriate ways. This way everyone can be involved in what the child is feeling and thinking, which leads to better safety planning as well as deeper empathy within the family.