In this book, I have discussed the function of dialogue in development, the upbringing of children, child welfare and child welfare organisation. I started from the idea that words –spoken and written – enable people to build up psychological continuity. Words are instruments that give structure to constantly changing life conditions. But this continuity also has a social context, and a society is only a social order if its members speak more or less in the same culturally accepted way, producing a common sense. This common ground is the foundation of social institutions. Continuity is then a social and narrative construct rather than an exclusively psychological one. People construct their life by telling stories about their life and by the active role they assume in the telling; they represent themselves to others and by doing so they define and redefine themselves. Continuity is thus the outcome of dialogical processes in which images of the self are presented and represented. In speaking, people affirm their subjectivity and their bond with the cultural context in which they live and the language they speak. Because language is symbolic, it is fundamentally symbols that enable people to take a subjective position towards others, and create shared understanding of the world they are involved in.

This shared understanding is often missing or is only rudimentary in families that have lost their grip on life and have become dependent on child welfare. In the most extreme cases, their lives are characterised by chaos, break-up and disorder. Parents and children make frantic efforts to free themselves from the chain of discontinuities, but often the seeds of these discontinuities have been sown at an earlier stage and are apparent in their life choices; perhaps they have married and had children at a young age, have had numerous, short-lived relationships, or take drugs or gamble to avoid facing their difficulties. It is sometimes a torment of Tantalus that can last for generations, an ongoing combination of negative social and individual factors that get them into trouble, and through which they then lose their independence. In many child welfare families, however, the situation is less desperate and child welfare intervention may be successful within a relatively short time.