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Parenting programmes are recommended as an effective means to support parents in promoting positive relationships with, and managing the behaviour of, their children. One barrier that impedes their successful implementation is that partners, especially fathers, are less frequently recruited by child welfare services. This article reports on a study that investigated how both parents were engaged with parenting services. Direct recordings were made of initial telephone conversations between six practitioners and 28 parents referred to those services and investigated for evidence of how the other parent was recruited. Conversation analysis was used to identify how participants introduced the possibility of both parents being included in the service; how these possibilities were negotiated and what eventual agreements were made for both parents to be included in future arrangements. Implications for practice, training and future research are considered.

Summary The social care assessment is a ‘key interaction’ between a person and the local authority with ‘critical’ importance for determining a person’s needs for care and support. In order to achieve this, the guidance requires that assessments must be ‘person-centred throughout’. The concept of person-centred practice is now routinely invoked, but there remains little empirical evidence on how it gets put into practice. Findings This paper draws on interview data from 30 practitioners about their experiences of conducting social care assessments in England. While there was widespread support for the principles of a person-centred approach, tensions emerged for practitioners in three ways: the way in which ‘chat’ was used to build a relationship or conduct the assessment, whether to conduct the assessment via a conversation or by following the sections on the agency form and the extent to which the assessor should involve and negotiate the contributions of family members. Applications We argue that each of these dilemmas represents an occasion when a commitment to person-centred practice is negotiated between professionals and service users and sometimes compromised as a result. We consider the possibilities for and constraints on achieving person-centred assessments in a post-Care Act environment and discuss the implications for social work practice and research.

Accessible summary When people with learning disabilities have children and become parents, they sometimes need good support to help them.Research about parents with learning disabilities and the support they get is usually about mothers and not fathers. There is not very much written about dads with learning disabilities.This paper is about interviews with eight dads with learning disabilities who told us about what it was like to be a dad and about the kind of support they had got.We think more support needs to be given to parents with learning disabilities and that dads should be included in this. Abstract Background This article reports on the perspectives of fathers with a learning disability in England about being fathers and the support they have received. Although there is an established literature that considers parenting with a learning disability, few studies have focused on the perspectives of fathers. Method We adopted a qualitative approach for this study, using semi‐structured interviews with eight fathers with learning disabilities, recruited through learning disability organisations and social media. The data were analysed using thematic analysis. Results Being a father was important to participants and the findings are presented in three themes: descriptions of fatherhood; challenges of fatherhood; and support with fatherhood. Conclusion We discuss how fathers' perspectives on fatherhood relate to wider transformations of fatherhood in society, the impact of these on fathering with a learning disability and the implications for services.

Loneliness is framed as an enduring problem for carers of all ages, including older carers; however, there is little examination of older men’s experiences of caring, loneliness and social isolation. Based on interviews with 25 men (aged 68–92 years), we discuss findings from a study of older male carers’ experiences of loneliness in England. Within their accounts, loneliness is framed as a future, rather than present, problem as caring provides a time-limited buffer to loneliness while concurrently increasing social isolation. Further, the findings shed light on how male carers seek and benefit from carers’ support groups while also maintaining autonomy.

This article examines how practitioners engage with parents who have been referred to parenting programmes. Engaging parents is an important component of child welfare work so that parents can benefit from interventions and outcomes for children can be improved. However, our knowledge of engagement is still developing and research in the field is frequently based on self-reported data. This study used Conversation Analysis to examine direct recordings of initial telephone conversations between parenting practitioners and parents following their referral to the service. Results revealed that in the majority of calls, practitioners focused on the primary task of making arrangements for the service, but in a minority of calls, practitioners departed from the usual progress of the call to ask parents about the difficulties they were facing. When they did so, practitioners committed themselves to substantial additional work listening to the parent and extending the length of the call. However, they also pursued different actions to engage the parent with the service that were built up incrementally in the talk. By examining three particular features of practitioners’ talk during these sequences, the article considers how a practice phenomenon such as engagement may be purposefully worked up moment by moment.

This chapter considers how conversation analysis can be used to understand professional practice as it happens and the circumstances in which fathers are made more or less visible in the interaction. On the one hand, social work is predicated on the basis that parents, including fathers, have the capacity for growth and to improve their own and their children's lives. On the other hand, social workers are required to identify when a parent presents a risk to the child and should no longer be caring for them. Given that most social work continues to be with mothers, the chapter shows that fathers represent a practical dilemma for social workers in terms of their presence or absence in a child's life, the quality of that involvement, and the potential for them to be positively engaged with change.