Working with families where building relationships is challenging
Explore practical strategies to engage with families where building relationships is challenging.
The core of effective practice is establishing and maintaining respectful relationships of trust with children, young people, and families. For many different reasons, this can be far from straightforward.
In this workshop, participants will develop practical strategies to engage with families when issues such as anxiety, reluctance, or hostility makes relationships difficult to establish.
With an emphasis on self-reflection and reflexive practice, participants will develop interpersonal skills for building relationships that include support and healthy challenge – essential aspects of relationship-based working.
Designed for
Family help and social care practitioners working directly with children and families.
Learning outcomes
As a result of attending this workshop, participants will be able to:
- Demonstrate techniques, skills, and approaches to enable empathic and authoritative relationships with families.
- Explain how power differentials and dynamics can operate in social care intervention with families.
- Compare different voices and perspectives about social care interventions.
- Challenge and reconceptualise the language often used to describe families who may not want to work with services.
- Understand theory underpinning the reasons and causes of conflict in professional-family relationships.
- Promote healthy challenge in professional-family relationships with increased confidence.
Booking information
This is a full day interactive session delivered via Microsoft Teams and you are encouraged to contribute with the aid of break-out rooms, the chat function and large group discussions. Participants will benefit from having a quiet space to work without interruption. Slides will be sent out after the session.
Research in Practice Partners can use their membership allocation to book this workshop. Link Officers can use the booking request form to book this workshop. Please only use this form if you are authorised to choose your organisation's membership allocation.
Once your booking is received, our learning team will work with you to confirm a delivery date and provide relevant information.
The deadline for booking this year’s online workshops is 17 October 2025.
Organisations that are not Research in Practice Partners can commission this workshop individually by contacting our learning team.
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