Collecting feedback as a tool to reduce care paralysis: something for family group conferencing coordinators?

Family group conferencing (FGC) coordinators in public mental healthcare are confronted with clients who have little faith in professionals and organizations, who hold off decisions in their family life, who avoid care and who sometimes behave in a hostile manner. A lack of initiative to deal with their situation is not only reserved for clients – all bystanders, including professionals, can suffer from it. The multiplicity and severity of the client's problems lead to a situation wherein everyone involved waits for the initiative of the other. The independence of the FGC coordinator – a fellow citizen, who is free of organizational loyalties and comes to assist other citizens in establishing a plan – seems to work well with the client group of the public mental healthcare. However, the coordinator cannot always prevent deferral or failure of conferences. Drawing on empirical and theoretical findings, this paper considers the possibility of collecting feedback as a way to contribute positively to the alliance between FGC coordinators and those for whom a conference is deployed. We highlight findings from three case studies that centred on multiproblem families. The findings indicate the importance of feedback theory for FGC coordinators in enhancing trust and engagement.     

Contact between birth parents and children in kinship care in a sample from Spain

Within the context of kinship care, the main objectives of this work are to study the characteristics of contact between foster children and their birth parents, and their relationship with key variables of fostering, the children and their kinship caregivers. The sample included 189 children from Spain and their kinship families. A semi‐structured placement interview and two scales relating to the child–caregiver relationship and child's psychological adjustment were used with the kinship families. The results revealed a significant percentage of foster children who had no family contact. Various visit types, frequencies and durations were described. Kinship care with contact, compared with placements without contact, was frequently characterized by the absence of professional supervision, and an affectionate child–caregiver relationship; moreover, children with contact were perceived to have fewer serious behaviour and socio‐emotional problems and a greater probability of family reunification. The regression analysis showed that the main predictors for how caregivers assessed contact were the children's emotional reaction during visits and the quality of the relationship between the kinship families and the birth parents. These results suggest the need for further research about contact, which will certainly have a major impact on professional intervention with these families.     

The Conversational Model and Child and Family Counselling: Treating Chronic Complex Trauma in a Systemic Framework

Child and Family Counselling Teams in NSW Community Health Services are expected to provide therapeutic services to children who have experienced complex trauma. However, parental trauma is often overlooked or referred elsewhere. A systemic perspective informed by attachment theory and trauma theory provides the basis for addressing parental trauma in Child and Family Counselling Teams, thereby improving parenting. The Conversational Model is an evidence‐based intervention for chronic complex trauma. The foundations of the Conversational Model and its brief component, Short Term Intensive Psychodynamic Psychotherapy, are outlined and a case study is given to illustrate the usefulness of the intervention in Child and Family Counselling. Highlighted is the importance of addressing systemic trauma through parenting to improve attachment quality, family relationships, and children's function.     

“This will help your children”: Service providers’ experiences with military families during cycles of deployment

ABSTRACT

Military families face not only the same challenges as other families, but also unique issues due to their military involvement. Parenting programs for civilian families can be helpful, but they do not generally cover the specific issues faced by military families. The purpose of this qualitative study was to gather information from a focus group of eight service providers about the types of issues that affect military families, such that content and delivery of workshops at a social service agency could be formed to specifically cater to military families. This study utilized a phenomenological approach, and analyses revealed areas for social service involvement around the cycle of deployment. Specifically, social services could be helpful by using psychoeducational and normalization techniques around the five major themes that resulted from this study: (1) the issues of servicemembers psychologically withdrawing before deployment, (2) family cohesion and connectedness during and after deployment, (3) family stability during reintegration of the service member, (4) military families experience many of the same challenges that nonmilitary families do (such as domestic violence and financial issues), and (5) utilizing a military culture framework for all military family programs.     

‘The house belongs to both’: undoing the gendered division of housework

This article studies 28 dual-income Spanish childless couples who were undoing gender in routine domestic work. We understand ‘undoing gender’ as defined by Deutsch [(2007). Undoing gender. Gender & Society, 21, 106–127, p. 122]: ‘social interactions that reduce gender difference’. The dual-earner couples came from different socio-economic backgrounds and were interviewed in four different Spanish towns in 2011. The analysis shows that resources in a wide sense, time availability, external help, ideas about fairness, and complex gender attitudes are key interdependent factors that can weave together to form different configurations leading to a non-mainstream division of housework. All configurations were based on principles of gender equality: some couples found it fair to have a 50/50 division of domestic work, others a 50/50 division of all work (paid and unpaid); and a third group showed conflicts in practice. These couples’ ways of undoing gender illustrate the external, individual, and couple circumstances under which spouses are able to achieve a non-traditional construction of unpaid work.     

Family Relationships,Social Connections,and Depressive Symptoms Among Chinese Older Adults in International Migrant Families

This study explored whether and how family relationships and social connections influence depressive symptoms of older migrants and older adults in transnational families using the data gathered from a cross-sectional survey in Los Angeles, California, United States, and Beijing, China. Regression results showed that the older migrants reported significantly higher levels of depression than the elders in transnational families. The findings highlight the importance of maintaining close family relations and having large friendship networks for older adults in international migrant families.     

Cambodian Refugee Families: Impacts of Immigration-Related Stressors on Intergenerational Relationships

The purpose of this study was to elucidate Cambodian refugees’ perceptions of immigration-related stressors and their impacts on intergenerational relations during the processes of immigration and settlement. We used narrative analysis to evoke older immigrants’ voices as they transitioned to the United States. Thirty-one Cambodian immigrants were interviewed using open-ended interview guides informed by ethnographic tenets of data collection. Participants expressed (a) changes in family structure and elder isolation and (b) intergenerational ambivalence and elder’s dependence on adult children as products of immigration-related stressors. Implications of these results for refugee and immigrant mental health research are discussed.     

Claymation for Collective Intelligence and Intergenerational Learning in an Educational Environment

Elementary students, volunteering older adults, and university students use their collective intelligence as they engage in intergenerational learning during an after-school enrichment activity producing Claymation videos. Participant reflections, completed questionnaires, and candid photos document learning and relationship building, suggesting intergenerational visual art engagement as a replicable method of lifelong learning for multiages in a school environment.     

Children's Experiences of Time When a Parent Travels for Work

This qualitative study focuses on the different ways time is experienced by children in families who face time challenges because of a family member's job that required work travel. Data are from a family‐level study that includes interviews of all family members older than age 7. Using grounded theory methodology, this study illustrates the ways in which job demands and family processes interact. The analysis centers on 75 children's perspectives from 43 families. Holding together assessments of having enough time while wanting more time with their parents, children express emotion, generally unrecognized by parents, around the topic of family time. Children's experience of time with parents is rushed or calm, depending on the activities done in time and the gender of the parent with whom they spend time. Findings are interpreted through a feminist social constructionist lens.     

The Palestinian Family in Israel: Simultaneous Trends

In this article, I seek to present the spectrum of contemporary family structures in Palestinian society in Israel, focusing on those that emerge in various contexts of changes in education, employment and place of residence. To enable attention to the multiplicity of identities engendered by intersection of the positions of gender/class/nationality and to assess the family patterns that maintain them and are shaped by them, I evaluate relations between two concepts: Connectivity, as proposed by Joseph (1999) and translocational positionality conceived by Anthias (2008). The former relates to the development of a feminine identity that develops in a patriarchal gender context, while the latter refers to the constant negotiation that women conduct with the contexts of their sense of belonging and the manner in which they use various resources. Those concepts help determine whether the process that Palestinian in Israel have been undergoing are accompanied by a greater variety of family patterns.

The article will be based on a study in which I conducted semi-structured, in-depth interviews with Palestinian mothers in Israel. The data were subjected to intersectional analysis from a feminist perspective, enabling study of the group under examination families of Palestinian women –separately from its surrounding society and also revealing the various subgroups comprising this social category.