What is life story work in adoption?
Through life story work, adoptive parents can work together with their child to give them a stronger sense of their history and heritage and the thoughts and feelings that result from this. This usually means helping them understand why they were adopted.
Who can do life story work?
Life story work is a social work intervention with children and adults designed to recognise their past, present, and future. It is prominently used with children who will be adopted, and older adults as part of reminiscence therapies.
Is life story work a legal requirement?
One of the ways we can try to help adopted children understand their past and where they come from is through life story books. They are a statutory requirement and should be given to children and their adopters within 10 days of their celebration hearing.
What should be included in a life story work?
This includes: emotional safety and strengthening support networks – helping the young person consider how they can access people or things that make them feel safe when they need to. emotional regulation – helping the young person manage difficult feelings.
Why is life story work so important?
The objective of life story work is to create a secure base for the looked-after child to explore their past, present and future. Life story work is an important way of helping a child to integrate their past into the present, in order to help them to move into the future.
What is the difference between life story work and therapeutic life story work?
Traditionally, Life Story work was delivered to Looked After Children through their social workers. SACCS provided recovery, within a therapeutic community, to children who had suffered complex and prolonged trauma, many placement breakdowns and were viewed as being unable to be fostered or adopted.
What are the potential benefits for family members of life story work?
Life Story work can help encourage better communication and an understanding of the person’s needs and wishes. This can inform their care and ensure that it is provided in a positive and person-centred way. It can help the person develop closer relationships with family carers and staff through sharing stories.
What are the advantages of life story work?
What is a life story practitioner?
Within this stage the The Lifestory practitioner collates both written and physical sources to provide greater insight into the child’s early life experiences. Often this can present in a variety of behaviours and without knowledge of the child’s history it is difficult to see the communication behind them.
What is TLSW?
Different to traditional Life Story Work or Life History Work, Therapeutic Life Story Work (or TLSW) is a defined approach pioneered by Richard Rose that directly involves the child’s primary carer (very often an adoptive parent or long term foster carer) from the beginning of the process to the end.
What does the term outpacing mean in dementia?
Outpacing: providing information, presenting choices and the like at a rate too fast for the person to understand; putting the person under pressure by expecting them to do things at a rate far exceeding their current capability.
Who invented life story work?
Richard Rose
Therapeutic Life Story Work has been an intervention for children, young people and adults for the last 30 years, but the approach has been developed to be used worldwide since 1997 by Richard Rose.