Solution-Focused Interviewing with Child Protective Services Clients.

This article provides a rationale for using a solutionfocused approach to child welfare practice. The common value base of both social and solution-focused practice is explored, and processes for implementing the latter approach in child welfare interviewing, including joining and working with the nonvoluntary client, exception building, complimenting, goal setting, and scaling questions, are discussed. Child welfare workers face numerous challenges, including large caseloads of mandated clients who seem unmotivated to change. Workers must gather and process a great deal of information in a short timeframe to make accurate assessments and to formulate decisions about the protection of children. Parents of children at risk for abuse and neglect may react with defensiveness and hostility when workers question their parenting practices. Families are often in crisis at the time of the interview with the child protective services (CPS) worker, and the CPS presence often precipitates a crisis in its own right, which tends to further inhibit information gathering and assessment. In the midst of all these pressures, workers strive to ensure the safety of children, to build collaborative working relationships with families, and to promote positive parenting practices. This article describes how the achievement of workers' goals can be aided by the use of a solution-focused approach to interviewing. Originally conceptualized by de Shazer [1985, 1988] and others [Berg 1994; Berg & Miller 1992], the solution-focused approach is concerned with the innate strengths and resources people possess. Rather than attending to the problem, the solution-focused approach emphasizes times when the problem is not a problem, and the worker helps clients identify and build upon the resources they use during these nonproblem times [Berg 1994; Berg & Miller 1992; Cade & O'Hanlon 1993; O'Hanlon & Weiner-Davis 1989]. The solution-focused approach shares a value base similar to that of social work, the predominate discipline in child welfare work. These shared values-starting where the client is, a belief in a systemic view of client change, and a strengths-based rather than a deficits-based perspective-are often difficult to put into concrete practice, particularly when the worker is faced with clients who are maltreating their children. Involved with the stressors and demands of child protection, workers may feel overwhelmed, frustrated, and without hope for their clients' ability to make use of services and to change in a positive direction. Solution-focused practice, however, assumes that all client situations carry with them potential solutions. The worker's role is to find these resources and assist the client in developing and using them to solve problems. Although history taking is vital in determining risk to the child, in solution-focused practice, digging into a client's past is seen as having limited usefulness since insight into the past will not necessarily change the future. For example, the knowledge that a physically abusive parent was physically abused as a child does little to change the parents' present disciplinary behavior. It is the solution-focused premise that taking action is what helps people change their lives [Berg 1994; O'Hanlon & Weiner-Davis 1989]; the emphasis is placed on achievable, concrete goals. In situations where children are at risk, the emphasis should necessarily be on what families can do in the present and the future to ensure the safety of their children. This article explores the ways in which workers can implement a solution-focused approach to helping families protect their children and parent them more effectively. While this article concentrates on the three different referral types-sexual abuse, physical abuse, and neglect-and on both investigative and subsequent interviewing, the interested reader is urged to read Berg [1994] for ongoing solution-focused work with physically abusive and neglecting families. …