“They’re not bad parents. They’ve just made bad choices.”: Mental health clinicians’ perspectives of parents involved with child protective services

Abstract

Although psychotherapeutic treatment (e.g., counseling and therapy) is often offered to clients involved with child protective services (CPS), the existing literature includes few voices of mental health clinicians regarding their work and clients in the child welfare system. The current study seeks to address this gap by exploring clinicians’ views on the issue of child maltreatment and CPS-involved parents’ parenting. Thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews revealed that clinicians acknowledged the strengths of CPS-involved parents as well as the challenges that may have made their parenting difficult. For strengths, clinicians identified parents’ desire to care for their child, motivation to improve their parenting, and commitment to their child. Identified challenges included a lack of parenting knowledge, substance use, and limited resources and support. Overall, clinicians in this study presented a balanced perspective that attended to both the “good” and the “bad” in their clients’ parenting. They viewed CPS-involved parents as more than the sum of their problematic parenting behaviors and understood incidents of child maltreatment within the parents’ contexts. At the same time, their interviews noted that a variety of individual and sociostructural challenges faced by CPS-involved parents must be addressed in order to resolve child maltreatment and prevent parents’ repeated involvement in the child protection system.