Life stories and arts in child welfare: enriching communication

Abstract

As narrative beings, we are surrounded by our own stories and other people’s stories. We are not necessarily fully conscious of these stories and they may not even be verbal; moreover, there is never a single version of a story. A negative story and stigmatised and damaged identities are easy to encounter in child welfare. To prevent exclusion and negative social inheritance are the major tasks of child welfare, but how to combat them? One remedy is enriching communication and a self-expression. In this article, we describe the theoretical literature that has guided our empirical project work in widening and deepening everyday communication in child welfare. The methods that we have developed are based on life story work and art-based activities. Improvements in narrative surroundings in residential care have guided our efforts over a 12 year period. We have studied the opportunities and possible roles that exist for art-based activities and narrative methods in supporting children’s coping, self-understanding and building up of self-capacity. We have also studied how the young people’s active participation in developmental work can produce new ways to obtain knowledge and understanding in child welfare. We have developed and promoted good practices to afford people working in the child welfare field with new opportunities and tools to improve professionals’ and children’s self-expression skills. A major result of these processes has been that the professionals felt that communication with children had moved closer to the children’s own experiences and emotions.