Nordic Social Work Research

PROVIDING THE RIGHT SUPPORT, AT THE RIGHT TIME - PREVENTIVE MEASURES TO SUPPORT AT RISK CHILDREN AND YOUNG PEOPLE

Supporting children and young people at an early stage through preventive measures is a strong ambition in welfare-state contexts across the world. This ambition is based on the idea that interventions which support and strengthen children’s and young people’s ability to function within ordinary settings or adjust to the environment around them can address emerging needs and difficulties before they become more extensive or embedded.

While this idea is in line with the intention of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and articulated broadly in national policies, a number of questions can be raised regarding a shift towards a more preventive orientation. The first concerns what is actually meant by the concept of preventive measures. Much of the support provided to children and young people could be described as preventive, yet often takes the form of broad, universal, promotive interventions aimed at strengthening parental capacity and children’s health, education and wider wellbeing. These approaches have the advantage of being inclusive, non-stigmatizing, and strengthening the fundamental capacities of and around children. However, are they too broad and imprecise to be truly effective for children and young people with greater developmental risks? Are universal approaches sufficient, or is greater investment needed in preventive measures that work with specific at-risk groups?

If preventive measures are invested in to complement and reinforce universal provision, questions arise concerning the precision with which ‘at risk’ children and young people can be identified. We know that “predictions work best in hindsight”; when the outcome is already known, it is easy to look back and conclude that certain early-life circumstances contributed to a children’s outcome. However, the reverse is far more difficult: to predict, with any degree of accuracy, which children will experience negative developmental trajectories, unless the circumstances are extremely adverse. How, then, should we determine who ought to be the focus of early, preventive interventions?

A third question concerns the choice of the intervention: what is the right support? There is a long tradition within various support systems of distinguishing those who have been identified as “troublesome” and in need of extra support. Yet, even when interventions are integrated, it is often very difficult to assess which specific measure is required for a particular problem, and existing interventions generally have, at best, low to moderate effectiveness. This means that there is a lack of genuine evidence regarding which intervention is appropriate for an individual child. How, then, can a knowledge-based approach to early intervention be developed?

A fourth question stems from the fact that the idea of early interventions is closely associated with the ambition for collaboration among different actors to bring about more holistic support, at both managerial and operative level. Within child and youth policy work, collaboration is generally presented as both necessary and fundamentally positive. However, numerous studies point to the difficulties and obstacles that prevent collaboration from functioning as intended. In short, collaboration is much easier to proclaim and hope for than to implement effectively in practice. How should collaboration be organised so that children and young people receive support they would not otherwise have had access to? And how should the various barriers and challenges to collaboration be addressed so that well-intentioned ambitions are not undermined?

This Special Issue invites both established and early-career researchers to share their knowledge and research in the field of early and coordinated interventions for children and young people.

Keywords

• Child welfare
• Early support
• Coordinated measures
• Prevention
• Promotion
• Preventive systems

Contributions to the special issue may include, but are not limited to, the following themes:

• Empirical and/or theoretical connections between universal provision and preventive measures
• Use of data to identify ‘at risk’ groups of children and young people
• Use of data to evidence the effectiveness of preventive measures
• Multi-disciplinary working to meet children and young people’s needs

Children and young people’s voice and participation in designing preventive measures