Family Early Help
Poverty Through a Compassionate, Mentalizing Lens
Any conversation about poverty requires humanity, compassion and using all of your Resilient Families practice skills. Feelings of shame, guilt, blame, overwhelm and worry are all likely to be near the surface when we explore poverty or material deprivation with families. Our job is to do all we can to reduce the shame and suffering of poverty, not reinforce it.
One example is mentalizing; in order to address poverty, it will be important that the family can see you really connecting with their lived experience, to help build that trusting relationship and to feel safe to explore these often difficult and emotional issues with you.
Talking About Poverty
When exploring poverty with a family, our curiosity questions might be "what is the impact of this family's socio-economic circumstances on their day-to-day life, what might help improve those circumstances and therefore help improve their day-to-day life".
This prompt sheet from Research in Practice contains some questions you can explore with families to understand more about income, employment, community supports and housing, in the context of helping to tackle poverty, and to identify what action we can take to alleviate some of the effects of poverty and help families move towards their goals.
This anti-poverty framework can also help us to think about steps we can take to address and alleviate poverty for and with families
