Understanding Parental Engagement with Child Welfare Services: An Integrated Model

This paper takes an ecological approach to understanding engagement of parents with services when children may be at risk of abuse / maltreatment. Gaining parental cooperation is a fundamental factor affecting social work interventions, treatment and decision-making. Based on a review of current literature, the paper adapts the Multifactor Offender Readiness Model (Ward et al., 2004) to the child welfare context, using insights from other theoretical and empirical work. Parental engagement with child welfare services is portrayed as having behavioural, attitudinal and relationship components, and is determined by internal (service user), and external (policy, programme and worker) factors.