Child Care Decisions — Intervention and the Law

Abstract

In looking at welfare work we have tried to extend the usual simplistic emphasis on client/worker interaction styled ‘practice’. So in the previous chapter we would contend that we were talking about practice, even if that practice seems to be primarily concerned with organisation and fellow workers. Our analysis and our discussions of the work try to overcome the simplistic categorisation and dichotomy of the experience of ‘being a worker’, distinguished from the experience of ‘delivering a service’. Nowhere is this more crucial than in this chapter on child care. It would be easy to slip here into an analysis and a description purely of client/worker interaction, with a discussion of policy and organisation ‘dealt with elsewhere’. In fact of course writing in such a way would only have presented an ‘idealised’ view of practice; one that takes place entirely out of a context. Yet to describe the context in too simple a way sees ‘context’ as something that totally structures the possibilities of practice and is therefore deterministic.