'How can I show love if I have never experienced it?'
Love-led social work practice can transform young people’s lives for the better according to advocates of the approach.
Once considered a taboo within social care, a movement to bring love into children’s social care is gathering pace.
It’s being promoted in residential settings by Children’s Homes Quality (CHQ), a professional partnership created to promote high standards and training in the sector.
CHQ has developed an evidence-based approach called Lovin’ Care which it says can “radically change” children’s homes by “releasing their staff and children’s potential to connect deeply”.
One provider adopting the approach is Child First Children’s Homes in West Sussex.
Matt Langley, practice manager at the home, says: “Lots of people are still quite resistant to the ideas we are trying to introduce.”
He believes resistance might be “more about people trying to safeguard themselves” than focusing on what children need.
A shift in thinking has also been seen at the highest levels in recent years. Last year, the government called its children’s social care reform strategy Stable Homes Built on Love.
According to Matt, the focus on love is vindicated through glowing testimonials from the young people Child First Children’s Homes works with and outstanding Ofsted reports.
He adds: “Lovin’ Care is an approach which allows us to create an environment where love between adults and children can safely flourish. It has the power to transform young people’s lives.
“We do this because every child needs to be loved unconditionally.”
Matt highlights five ‘love languages’ - physical touch, acts of service, gifts, quality time and words of affirmation.
While some young people might benefit from physical touch - such as a hug - others might struggle with it but could benefit from praise.
Matt gives an example of a young girl commended for getting to school on time who struggled to get to sleep that night as she was in floods of tears, which turned out to be happy ones.
“She was so happy someone was proud of her and she hadn’t heard that before.”
Mary-Anne Hodd, who grew up in foster care and is now a lived experience trainer and consultant, strongly believes there is a place for love in social care. She says: “We associate it with the romantic word but there are so many ways to express love.
“The theme of love goes right into that area of understanding of what young people need to overcome - that experience of early adversity.
“How can I show love if I have never experienced it?”
Part of the Lovin’ Care approach involves staff keeping diaries where they reflect on their working day and ask how they might do things differently, dispensing with institutionalised language such as staff, residential unit and contact and the removal of offices, which are instead turned into “functional spaces”.
Other steps have seen the removal of signs, noticeboards and educational leaflets.
Further initiatives include allowing children to have friends over for sleepovers and families visiting for tea, dinner or other special occasions.
The home also strives to continue lifelong contact with children after they leave.
One young person said of the home: “I love living here. I have been in foster homes before and right now is the closest to a family home I have felt.”
According to Ofsted, children at the four homes run by the provider “are flourishing because adults provide them with emphatic, loving and sensitive care”.
Talking about love in social care can, however, be troubling to some. Interviewed in PSW magazine last month, professor of social work Janet Melville-Wiseman, who was in care herself as a child, said: “I do have a problem with the concept of ‘love’.
“What do we mean by love when lots of children have experienced really serious, damaging traumatising abuse in the name of love in either care settings or their own homes?”
But Matt says: “We are not worried about what people are going to come in and say because we know it is right.
“We hadn’t achieved an outstanding for 20 years and we are constantly achieving outstanding ratings across our homes and we are keeping them.”
Read social worker Bill Stone’s analysis of love in social work What’s love got to do with it?