Page 10 - Meeting with Children Manual

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INTRODUCTION

“I do not want to meet with a child because I don’t want to increase the pressure
already on those poor kids”.

“I just think this family law stuff is parents’ work, and we should protect children from
their parents’ nastiness”.

Voices and choices is a tiny phrase that occupies the thoughts of many courts,
government officials, lawyers and mental health professionals. Due to the fear that
voice equals choices, our system has managed to function with very limited ability to
ever engage with the voices of children.

The Meeting with Children course manual was developed to assist ADR practitioners
to follow a standard approach when engaging in a child inclusive practice. The
manual is divided into 6 sections which provides a step-by-step road map for
working with family systems. Embedded in the 6 sections are three distinct phases:
1) Preparation Phase; 2) Meeting with children Phase; 3) Feedback Phase. The three
phases help practitioners to focus on specific tasks necessary to move through a
child inclusive process from beginning to end.

The Meeting with children approach emphasizes the need for practitioners to follow
protocoled guidelines, forms and scales so that children may be included in
consistent, deliberate and safe ways. Children deserve to be thought about as part of
their family systems rather than as subjects of their family systems. Children have
many things to say about their own experiences that can add a rich overlay to adult
discussions and planning. When using structured guidelines for child inclusion,
practitioners can then begin to compare and contrast individual differences and
similarities across different ages and stages of development as well as to compare
family issues and dynamics. Collecting information about how different children
express their needs and how different families receive this information adds a
richness and level of expertise to practice. Protocoled guidelines also help
practitioners to compare and contrast family outcomes across different settings and
jurisdictions.

The training manual is designed to assist those practitioners who are already child
inclusive as well as those who want to begin a child inclusive practice. The manual is
a guide to a particular approach that emphasizes getting out of the way of directing
child input from the adult point of view by inviting the child to say what he/she feels
is salient to him/her. The MWC manual is a useful tool over time in that practitioners
can return to the manual to reference the “how-to” steps and scripts related to
directive and non-directive engagement strategies. This ensures practitioner
consistency and increases the likelihood of enduring skill development.

The manual helps practitioners to navigate through a number of challenges related
to authentic, non-tokenistic child inclusion. Cross referencing between parent issues

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