Practice | 2019
Reviews and reflection: Focusing In on critical parenting agendas
Abstract
Social work is frequently associated with our role in ensuring that children are well protected and supported. The consistent articulation is for the triumvirate of policy, practice and research to be constantly integrated in developing new approaches and understanding. The reasoning is that personal and professional critical evaluation helps assure that social work continues to advance in its responses to the crisis and need of children and families. In this the final issue of the year, we bring together four articles that embrace these deliberations. In the first article, Asher Woodman-Worell and Martyn Higgins provide a systematic review examining adoption for children with disabilities or mental health experiences. The structure of such searches helps provide rigour to the process of searching in the proverbial haystack of evidence. They provide robust and succinct focused summaries for others. In this instance WoodmanWorrell and Higgins have critically examined seven, predominantly qualitative studies, out of initial potential 678 articles. The review focuses on the three actors of; child, adopter and organisation, and the core messages which the authors distil are those of a need for effective interventions, support to carers and the need for collaborative policy and organisational working. While the messages may seem familiar, this article provides a timely reminder of the importance of doing these core basics well, at the same time as responding with specificity in regards to the diversity of experience and need. The article concludes with calls for more research into very specific types of adoption arrangements for children with particular sets of needs. We follow this with a second systematic review. In this instance a focus by Simon Haworth into social work practice with single fathers. Coincidently he also distils down from very high numbers of initial searches and findings, to seven articles, and observes that such focused inquiries highlight the lack of research with such specific groups. Haworth’s examination is augmented through theoretical frameworks associated with gender roles and in particular borderwork as developed by Doucet. The article extracts some really