Reflections on challenging behaviour and social work

My two main areas of experience in social work began in child protection services, followed by children with disabilities teams. Challenging behaviour had a part to play in the former, but usually the greatest challenges were from the parents, either through resistance, disguised or non-compliance and simply lacking the ability to make the significant behaviour changes to provide their children with a safe stable home life. Moving into children with disabilities services, some of these parental challenges remained, however a new element of safeguarding became more common – that of children with challenging behaviour, sometimes extreme and violent, making them one of the main risk factors within the family home. Some children would attack their parents and siblings, damage the home, putting a huge strain on the resources and resilience of parents and carers. The dynamic of parents being scared of their own children, often seemed like a complete reversal of my previous child protection work.