Stories Less Told: Parenting Strengths and Family-of-Origin Experiences amongst Parents Involved with Child Protective Services

Strengths-based child welfare practice emphasises the importance of acknowledging clients' capacities and potentials when addressing their presenting issues of child maltreatment. However, the child welfare literature has focused more on parents' risk factors and deficits whilst giving limited attention to positive parenting practices that they may have employed. Based on semi-structured interviews with parents involved with child protective services (CPS), this study explored these parents' self-identified parenting strengths in light of their family-of-origin experiences. Results of interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) revealed that participants identified parenting strengths in the areas of provision, protection, emotional care and relational support, and parental guidance and discipline. All demonstrated a strong desire to provide their children with a better upbringing than their own and shared what they believed they had done well in parenting. Interestingly, participants seemed to have parented most intentionally in the areas in which they felt most deprived in their own childhood, which may have played a role in creating deficits in other areas of parenting. Implications for practice include the need for a 'both/and' approach that attends to parents' strengths as well as areas for growth and the importance of family-of-origin work in child welfare practice.