This chapter examines the ways in which families with complex needs have been understood and represented in policy discourses, and the implications for social work with families where there are care and protection needs. Family-minded practice has struggled to receive sustained attention in social work, and yet the notion of family as the context for the resolution of children's needs extends the scope for supporting change and provides an accurate reflection of children's lived experiences. The maintenance of connections for children with their birth family has been a focus of concern across the range of social work interventions, and the messages from research repeatedly highlight the role birth families play in future wellbeing (while recognising that for some children living with their family is unsafe and untenable). The difficulties in arriving at approaches to family engagement in the care and protection of children have, in part, been a product of our reluctance to go beyond the presenting unit (however fractured that may be), despite the evidence that family networks are fluid, diverse and rarely geographically specific:

In this chapter family refers to the extended network of the child, and moves away from narrow notions of immediate carers. Family is a contested term; family theorists have argued that new types of relationships have emerged that make traditional notions of family redundant. Intimacy and individualisation have become preferred lens through which to understand relationships. But, for many engaged in family studies, family remains a useful conceptual tool in understanding both how relationships are organised and how they are sustained. It is well documented elsewhere that much family-minded policy and practice is in reality concerned with parents (in particular mothers) (Morris et al, 2009). Understanding how families are understood in policy and then seeking to locate the social work practice responses in this analysis allows us to consider if our responses to vulnerable families are adequate, or indeed appropriate. By tracing the changing discourses that inform family-minded practice the challenges for families in navigating professional terrain become apparent, and provoke questions about how policy and practice may, at least in part, generate the very problems they profess to address.