Helping parents,protecting children: ideas from Germany

This paper focuses on the help‐seeking process in the field of child welfare and, with a view to identifying some of the key conditions which facilitate the process, it examines the ways in which the German system responds to parental requests for help. It is based on recent comparative studies between English users of child welfare and protection services and a similar group in Germany and on discussions with German and English social workers. It is suggested we can usefully learn from the preventative services available in Germany under the Children and Young Persons Help Act (1990) which make both help seeking and help giving more straightforward. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.