Children's Agency, Children's Welfare: A Dialogical Approach to Child Development, Policy and Practice – By Carolus van Nijnatten

Abstract

This book proposes a dialogical approach to child development and child welfare practice that reasserts the importance of communication – through talk, stories, narratives, language and reflection – in children's development, in professional child welfare practice and in child welfare organisational arrangements. In doing so, the book provides an overview of postmodernist contributions to child development theory as they pertain to the child welfare field. In particular, the book unpacks the concept of ‘agency’ for child welfare work. Agents take an active position in the world and can influence events that concern them. Agency develops through dialogue and interaction with other people and social institutions. The book analyses agency at three levels: for individual children and parents, for child welfare professionals, and for child welfare organisations. These are interrelated, because child welfare gets involved when parents or children lack adequate agency; that is, they lack the power or the capacity to be autonomous or to manage their lives. It is argued that the same kinds of processes are required to develop agency in children, to build or to repair agency in troubled parents, and to develop agency in child welfare professionals and organisations. Dialogue is the key process that develops agency.