PAR Conference Speech - November 3rd

On November 3rd, I had the opportunity to speak at the Parents Advocacy and Rights Conference in Edinburgh.

Here I post my speech:

Today, I am going to focus on speaking about child protection case conference meetings.
From my perspective, I could unaffectionately call my experiences with child protection meetings the Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Three very different meetings, from my perspective, with the same family, same faces round the table, same circumstances for the most part, but the entire experiences were as different as oil, water and soda.

It has taken a great deal of reflection to try to see why these experiences were so different.
As such, I think it is important to reflect on how a meeting works.

Because one of the most traumatic parts of child protection is expectations.

I don't mean a meeting in a child protection capacity. I mean meeting in a wider, broader sense. Consider a business meeting. Any business meeting will have a very specific purpose that will have been set out ahead of the meeting.

It is important to understand that there is already a goal in mind before you even attend the meeting. The meeting is not the time to make changes. A meeting is to inform, not gather data.

The chair of the meeting has a vital role in having already spoken to all the parties involved in advance of the meeting. No chair would go into a meeting unsure about what all parties are going to say, because it is the chair's role to orchestrate and guide the meeting through all the stages to its conclusion. The chair will want everyone at the meeting to work together to bring about the set conclusion.

In a business meeting, it is really important that information is gathered ahead of the meeting. This prevents unnecessary complications and, in order to plan for the sessions ahead, the meeting needs, to a degree, to have a goal in mind ahead of time.
This is good business. It allows for solid, constructive communication to be partaken to create a plan going forward.

In a child protection case conference, this is also true.

The chair of the meeting should meet with you ahead of the meeting. It is vital, seriously it is absolutely vital, that ahead of the meeting you participate as fully as you are able such that your voice and your contributions can be thrown into the melting pot of voices that will guide and develop not just the goal of the meeting but the plan going forward.

Get your voice in early.

The social work case worker is a key figure. This social worker will construct a risk assessment. From brutal experience, please do whatever you need to such that you work with the social worker to build that risk assessment. Call the social worker, meet with the social worker, invite the social worker around for a cup of tea.

In my experience the quickest way to make a social worker run away... is to invite them around a lot.

I know that sounds like simple, almost ridiculous advice. But engage. Engage even when it feels like you are drowning. Engage when it hurts to breath, engage when you think you have never felt so mad in all your life.

Engage when you run into a personality clash - when you find a social worker who seems to push every button, daring you to fail.

Bite your tongue, remember who you are doing this for. Your child, your perfect, amazing, precious person. Keep them at the front of your thoughts. There is nothing you wouldn't do for this blessing in your life. So, while it may be understandable to be annoyed, to be frustrated, but set it to one side, one hour at a time, and make yourself determined to work with your social worker.

Ahead of our very first initial Child Protection conference, I had no idea what to expect. To say I was uninformed would be an understatement.

I truly believed that this meeting was a good thing. I believed this would be a meeting where everyone could sit down around the table, have a genuine discussion and we would all leave with the world set to right.

If you have been through this process, you may well think I was a proper idiot. I had this idea in my head that this was a discussion.

I thought my words would matter.

But everyone else in the room had the big, fancy important words and acronyms. They had important professional job titles. Most importantly, they had big, serious concerns, and I was left floundering. I studied to a university level and yet, I had never felt more stupid or broken.

Very broken.

It felt a lot more like being a naked gladiator shoved into an arena full of lions as the realisation dawned upon me - there was a very specific outcome orchestrated long before I appeared in the meeting room.

I was very underprepared for that first meeting and the worst part, what made the experience so much harder than it needed to be, was my own misguided expectations.

Meetings are not places for discussion. Discussions happen before meetings, they happen after meetings, but not during meetings.

I had no idea what the structure or format of this meeting would be, or what my role would be. I didn't know where or when I should speak, or what everyone else's roles were.

I think to a point, you can only really learn by experience. It has taken a few of these meetings for me to feel in anyway able to articulate what was going on, and I am not that dense.

The huge difficulty faced by parents, by me!, is that this meeting will undoubtedly be called at the worst moment in your life. Something awful has happened, or is happening, and now, you are under the greatest scrutiny of your life - Everyone's favourite, right? Safe to say, your stress levels are off the chart, and you are now competing with professionals. People who have been doing this for years, who have more experience with this than you will hopefully ever have, and they all slept soundly last night.

So, don’t compete.

That is right. I am really saying that. Fight or flight is overwhelming your brain, and I am telling you to override that impulse.

Don't compete.

Seriously, the deck is stacked. Work together, you can't take them single handedly!

You may feel that your efforts go unnoticed, unappreciated. There may be a lot of different reasons for this, at this stage.

What I can say is don't stop trying. Sometimes, time is the key, and everyone needs to see you are committed and serious about being onboard.

Sometimes, I think that while social work acknowledge that parents to play a valuable role in their children’s lives, the honest truth is the application certainly doesn’t feel like it.

Corporate parents do need to pay more than lip service to biological parents.

But it is important that while this may feel the case, that you are being overlooked, take a good long look at the situation. I was told so many times - this is early days. This is early days.

I hated those words. I did not want any of these days. I did not like the idea that there was lots more to come. I did not like the idea that this was only the beginning. I wanted to fix this right now. I want to make everything better right now.

But I couldn't.

And I wanted these people to leave my family alone.

But they couldn't.

Time has helped build bridges.

Time. That will stretch out like taffy, too thin and too long.

Work at building bridges, time and again, I have found there is no other way.

This is where you have to learn a new way to work with people, who disagree with you on a level which you have never previously experienced. Just breath. Say less.

Most importantly: Surround yourself with support.

The most important advice I can give, the most effective experiences that I have had through this process, has been Support.

Get an advocacy worker.

Advocacy workers are angels who will be there for you in your time of greatest need. They can speak when you can't. Having someone who you can discuss what went on and re-orient you after the meeting with, is invaluable. Our advocate's post meeting debrief was unbelievably helpful. He would say to me that went well, they said this, and that was encouraging. Or he would explain to me you need to do this, that is what they were telling you. It is so difficult to take everything onboard.

Bring support to every meeting.

I wish I could say you just need support through those initial days. But the truth is, you need your support team for the long haul. This is where you really find out who your friends are, because for most parents this is not brief.

At some point you need to set aside being deeply sad, deeply ashamed, deeply mourning, and get ready to fight. This is were you need to start pouring all your fight into winning your child back.

And that requires a major shift in emotion, if I am honest. You have to climb out of the crumbled, wreck of your soul, and find your fight.

Those initial days and weeks I spent in a state of shock, numb and overall feeling broken beyond words.

So many of my friends told me that they just wanted to see me get mad. They would have felt more comfortable seeing me angry. Seeing me defeated and traumatised was really hard on everyone.

Anger is volatile, but it is also useful. I was afraid to get angry. I was scared I wouldn't be able to stop. Letting myself have the right to feel mad was helpful. It helped motivate me to stand up and fight.

And fight we did... and fight we continue.

I really, really mean it when I say WE. Because I could not have survived without support.

That has to be your priority. Get support. Talk to your friends, your partner, your parents, your church, your child's school even. TALK to people. There is this

huge shame, this huge barricade to opening up. And when you do, you realise two very important things.

First, people are much more sympathetic and supportive than you assumed.

And second, you are not the first person to go through this. 

My world view was rocked, by all the people that said, we are going through the same thing. Or my sister went through that, I remember what it was like. Or I was in care, I know how it feels.

The trouble is that nobody wants to talk about it.

The stigma of 'bad mum' is too great. Children enter care for lots of reasons, and only a few of them are due to 'bad mum' syndrome.

My child had never been shouted at, never been hit. She had not suffered poverty, or divorce. She had never been emotionally or sexually abused. There was no drug abuse or mental health problems in our home. She came from an affluent middle class home, with two professional parents. She had never wanted for anything. Social work's parenting assessments have always reflected that I have 'exceptional parenting skills'. It frequently mentioned that I was always calm, patient and positive. An affectionate and loving mother. My daughter’s social worker affirmed that my daughter’s needs were always met.

And, my child became 'looked after'.

For every parent, for what ever reason who is apart from their child - there will be blue days. 

Days when the feelings of loss are so great, you could drown in them.

For those days, let me say:

I am sorry for every day, every park visit, every movie night, every birthday party and Christmas that she is missing. 

For every time you buy shoes, and you aren't buying her a pair. 

When you order ice cream, and there is one less cone. 

When you serve dinner and her plate isn't there. 

When you read bedtime stories and her head isn't there to be kissed.

For every time the sun shines, and you would just pick up a blanket go to the beach for a 'Nic Nic' (picnic). 

For every time it rains, and she is not there to teach your favourite board game, to make that blanket fort, to bake those cakes.

For how the grocery store is suddenly filled with children just her age.

When did everyone else suddenly have a child just like the one you are missing.

From singing silly songs, to barely paying attention, lost in her own games, as she played in the back ground while you work in the garden.

To when strangers nod to your children and ask, 'All yours?' And you don't know how to answer when one is missing. 

I am so sorry for all that she/ he is not there.

Keep Holding On.

Believe in yourself.

Surround yourself in people who believe in you.

Get an advocate.

And talk, keep talking, tell your story, and know that you are not alone. 

I believe in you.