Seminar two ‘Vulnerable babies’ under a risk paradigm'

The risks to the health, well-being and development of infants and very young children of less than optimal care have been prominent in policy discourse and ‘parenting’ advice in recent years. The idea of a ‘critical period’ for child development, beginning in utero, and continuing over the first two to three years of life has become firmly established. This perspective locates the risks to babies within the family and emphasises the importance of good maternal care that begins from the moment of conception, if not earlier (Waggoner, 2017). Ariane’s study of pre-birth child protection work found that pregnant women were repeatedly blamed and shamed for problems that can be understood as structural and not under the women’s direct control; particularly poverty, poor housing, and domestic abuse. As one young expectant mother described her experience of child welfare processes, ‘I don’t feel like I’ve been treated even as a human’. The harm that this may create for mothers has been well-established in research (Broadhurst & Mason, 2020). However, the perspective of infants themselves is less frequently adopted, beyond a child rescue narrative. What are the consequences for those babies and young children whose home lives, families and even the uterine environments they grow within, are understood as ‘risky’?

References

Broadhurst, K., and Mason, C. (2020), Child removal as the gateway to further adversity: Birth mother accounts of the immediate and enduring collateral consequences of child removal. Qualitative Social Work, 19:1, pp. 15–37.

Waggoner, M.R. (2017), The Zero Trimester. Pre-Pregnancy Care and the Politics of Reproductive Risk. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.

Biography

Ariane is a social work academic with an interest in how the profession meets families during pregnancy and in early childhood. Prior to her career in academia, Ariane qualified as a social worker and worked in the areas of child welfare and protection for a decade, later specialising in adoption work. In 2019 Ariane completed an ESRC-funded PhD at the University of Edinburgh. Her thesis Quickening Steps focused on the understudied topic of pre-birth child protection and used ethnographic methods to make a practice-near study of pre-birth work. Ariane has also undertaken research into adoption and is interested in critical perspectives on the lives of infants and parents involved in the ‘care system’. Ariane took up a lecturing post at Edinburgh Napier University in January 2019, and she enjoys working in spaces where practice wisdom and research knowledge can come together in order to strengthen social work approaches to complex challenges.

Related Recent and Forthcoming Publications

Critchley, A. (2020). Baby Brain: Neuroscience, policy-making and child protection. Scottish Affairs, 29(4), 512-528. In Press.

Critchley, A., Cowan, P., Grant, M. and Hardy, M. (2020). Changes and Continuities in Adoption Social Work: Adoption in Scotland Since the 1968 Act, The British Journal of Social Work, Early View.

Critchley, A. (2020). ‘The lion's den': Social workers' understandings of risk to infants. Child and Family Social Work, 25 (4), 895-903.

Critchley, A. (2020). Pregnancy and Risk: A social work perspective. Guest blogpost for the WRISK project, 18th February 2020. British Pregnancy Advisory Service and Cardiff University.

Critchley, A. (2019) Jumping through hoops: Families’ experiences of pre-birth child protection. Chapter 8 in Murray, L., McDonnell, L., Hinton-Smith, T., Ferreira, N. and Walsh, K. (Eds.) (2019) Families in Motion: Ebbing and Flowing through Space and Time. Bingley: Emerald Publishing, 135-154.