A solution based on proven techniques

Tough Conversations in Child Protection is a one-day course for child protection professionals and family workers to help them to hold the often-challenging conversations with parents in child protection. The origin of these child protection workshops arose from a similar series of workshops already being held nationally for school principals. The workshop helps busy professionals to quickly assess and prepare for tough conversations in situations where clarity-of-message can make all the difference for vulnerable families.

About the course creator Michael Hawton

Michael Hawton is a psychologist, trained teacher and author. He has worked as an expert witness in The Family Court of Australia and The NSW Children’s Court. He is a highly experienced mediator and has developed several nationally recognised parenting, practitioner and teacher PD courses. These programs have been taught to over 110,000 professionals, parents and teachers since 2006.

Course Outline

The course teaches a method to:

• Identify and clearly articulate the strengths and deficits in parents’ caring capacity so that parents have a clear future work plan.
• Comprehensively gather information for holding a factual tough conversation so that as many facts (as can be reasonably gathered) can be brought to bear in conversations with parents.
• Defuse antagonism during a tough conversation while holding a firm line.
• Identify the important ‘dashboard’ markers for parents so that everyone has clarity about what is expected within a given timeframe.

Please note that this is not a train-the-trainer course and it is not designed for the subsequent on-training of other workers back at your workplace.

Lesson Framework

• Why people overreact.
• Self-control factors in adults and young people.
• How ‘frustration tolerance’ develops in people.
• What to tolerate: sorting out what to let go and what needs your attention.
• What people will do if you challenge them.
• A step-by-step process to address a problem.
• How to tame tigers: effectively dealing with offensive behaviour.
• A video demonstration of the concepts applied to a tough conversation between a child protection worker and a parent.