“It's a relational approach with the whole system”: Social work perspectives on recovery-oriented approaches with children and their families

Translating recovery-oriented practice with children and their families is complex and fraught. Limited research has investigated how social workers navigate competing systemic agendas that can legitimise biomedicalised and depoliticised recovery approaches in everyday practice. This Australian exploratory study used Action Learning Sets (ALS) to co-create knowledge with social workers working in child and youth mental health services. Preliminary exploration shows many contradictions in recovery-oriented work and the challenging practice terrain social workers traverse in attempting to work in partnership with children and their families. The analysis illustrates how social workers have reconceptualised adult-centric and individualised notions of recovery to work in systemically, developmentally responsive, trauma and attachment-informed ways when working with the child, their family and the whole system. The study, however, also shows the fine line that social workers’ tread in enacting relational recovery-oriented practice. Neoliberal, biomedical and ‘evidence-based’ approaches can easily dominate, which leaves unaddressed the intersecting structures of oppression that perpetuate children's distress. The need to investigate recovery rhetoric and find critical social work practices of possibilities within the contradictions was underscored