Do Social Workers ever stop whining?
It appears to me that there a lot of them who never stop acting like martyrs and do nothing but moan and complain about the job.
I’m fine with whining about the political side of things, not enough social workers, not enough money from central government, blah blah blah.
I’m talking about the incessant whining about the job itself. That it’s the hardest job in the world, always looking for pats on the head and being told they are amazing,
Nurses are currently doing a series of strikes over pay because they are paid a pittance. They do a job that I would not want to do ever. Just every single aspect of it, The worst aspect of being a nurse from my perspective is when you lose a patient, times that by a million if the patient is a child. They don’t whine all over the internet, they will cry and lean on their colleagues, friends, and family, when they have had a bad day, but they don’t whine all over the internet.
A family member was a gynaecology nurse. You get cases of ovarian cancer which is often only discovered when it’s too late. Saw lots of young women with children dying in hospital and my family member needed lots of support for that, but never complained about the actual job itself.
I’ve got a social worker coming round on the 3rd January, i’ve already written it off as a complete waste of time and that i’ll get no support. The reason for this is because i’ve now got it in my head that social workers really do not care, they hate the job, especially as nobody praises them, and as such they just go through the motions. That social worker is going to do the bare minimum and not even attempt to fight for any help for me.
Just look at this article from Social Work News from social worker Matt Bee:
I don’t know if he has a husband or wife or a partner who he lives with, but I know plenty of people who have to juggle work and children,
He is acting like a martyr, a lot of his posts are about how his job is so hard and the theme running through his posts is that he hates being a social worker. He was stating a few years ago that his job was solely responsible for him drinking too much.
Now back to nurses, a profession I had a lot of dealings with recently as a family member was in hospital. Doing 13 hour shifts with a smile on their faces and you had to work it out yourself how long they had been on shift as they act the same as soon as they come on duty as they do when they are leaving. They only talked about money when we brought up the subject. They nursed my extremely poorly family member back to health and that was their reward. They said as much when I arrived to take my family member home with boxes of chocolates and biscuits for them.
Social workers aren’t like that, they don’t thrive on the rewards of the job, they don’t thrive on helping people who are in a bad place to get to a good place.
My Dad died when I was twenty, he had leukaemia. He spent a great deal of time in hospital beforehand. He had strong chemo, he had full body radiation treatments. It damaged his heart, he had to have a heart operation. It took something like 8 hours. One of the nursing staff who was the age I was then was on the night shift and came off shift shortly after he went down and came into the family room with us and was talking to us. This went on for a while and I mentioned something about her going home when she said she wasn’t going home until he was out of surgery as she wouldn’t be able to sleep until she knows he’s okay.
That same nurse than found out two weeks later, as did we, that the leukaemia was back and there was nothing that could be done. She would have found out he’d died when my Mum phoned the ward a few days after he died to let them know. She would have been working when she found out, she would have carried on being wonderful to the all the other patients she was caring for, and that she knew that a lot of them would not survive.
So yeah, social workers want the same praise as nurses get, while whining incessantly about doing the job they chose to do.
Then I read this:
The title is misleading, the article is basically about never hugging anyone you are working with, from a man who works with children. I was in my early twenties and had gone to visit a friend. Her boyfriend and her boyfriend’s 4 year old son was there as she lived with her boyfriend. I was talking to the 4 year old who they decided to give me a rundown of how you inject heroin, something he’d seen his mother do on a daily basis. He told me this because we had been playing on his nintendo and he was telling me his Dad wouldn’t let him take any of his toys home. My first thought was that this was wrong as his Dad wasn’t the kind of person who would deprive his son of toys like that. The lad then told me it was because ‘mummy would sell them’. He was sleeping on a mattress because his mum had sold his bed for drug money.
Social Services were involved but would not remove the boy from his mother. Dad ended up selling everything he could and borrowing money, got £3000 together and in effect bought the boy from his mother. The boy wanted female attention and despite not being a mother at that time, he got it from me. I initiated nothing but he spent a great deal of time on my lap, in my arms, holding my hand when we went out. I didn’t think, I just did. Dad ended up splitting from my friend, found a new girlfriend, had kids together and of course the boy was living with them, happy ending for the little one.
When someone needs a hug it’s not a spoken thing. I was at the hospital and paying for parking and a woman was trying to work out the machine so I showed her. She was telling me what she was doing up there and we were talking and I hugged her because she needed a hug, it’s just that thing that you can feel when someone needs a hug.
How can Vince Peart be so militantly hands off when he works with children and their parents?
I have been hugged by professionals before. I have developed extremely friendly relationships with professionals before. I have a very warm and friendly relationship with a professional at the school who I care about and who cares about my children and myself. I have recently decided to homeschool my youngest. That professional is who I rely on for everything I need to know about education. I’m not even going to bother asking her for home school advice. Her job is to get my youngest to school, she is not allowed to give me any advice about anything that involves not getting my youngest into school. If I see her around after my youngest has left I will give her a big hug and we will chat. There won’t be any connecting on social media, nothing like that, but she has provided much comfort to myself over the years on a personal level.
I’ve had many professional relationships like that over the years. I’ve had hugs, i’ve been comforted and even under the heaviest scrutiny, not one of those professionals has ever crossed a boundary. Not the member of staff from the same school who ripped me into pieces in my own home. Her opening line was “what the hell do you think you are doing” and then ripped into me. Every time I said something she shut me up and had another go. She then told me I was harming my children, I strongly disagreed. I was in the grip of an eating disorder and was severely underweight. I was super smart and my children hadn’t even noticed my weight loss. She disagreed strongly with that. She knew exactly what i’d then do, that i’d try and prove her wrong by doing the obvious, which was ask the children.
10 months later, during Covid, across a carpark, I got out of my car and i’m walking around and showing myself off to her so she could see how much weight i’d gained, she was grinning like a lunatic.
She raised her voice and belittled a parent for something that on the surface was nothing to do with the child she came round to see. Child wasn’t attending school, they have to do welfare checks. That was one of the most caring things a professional has ever done to me, shouting at me in my own home. She knew me, she knew how to play me, she knew that if she mentioned the children i’d try to prove her wrong, she knew exactly what the children would say and what my reaction would be.
Not a social worker but a fine example of social work.
I could nominate her for teacher of the year in Essex, or one of the national ones. With the full story of what she has done for my family over a period of many years, she would definitely get shortlisted, would probably win.
However, if I nominated her and she got shortlisted they would never find my body. I only wrote the gushing letter to the headteacher about her actions because the headteacher had said publicly about how down they were about all of the stupid copy and paste emails they were getting from parents about masks, vaccines, and testing, so I thought i’d send something to show him to just keep going.
The teachers reward was initially me having the realisation my weight was impacting my children, and then me doing something about it, and knowing that would would have an amazingly positive effect on my children.
To think that Vince Peart might not do things like that because he doesn’t want to be friends with service users actually makes my heart ache. I knew from experience that the teacher who had a go at me was always 100% on my children’s side with every single thing she did. She is my friend and I love her dearly for everything she’s ever done for us. I will probably never see her again, she’s left the school. She cannot contact me on social media for obvious reasons. I would also never contact her.
If you are friends within the confines of a professional relationship you can never be friends outside of that relationship because of the uneven balance of power. She had power over me and my children due to the nature of her position. Our relationship has always been based on her knowing more about children and education than I do and her instructing me what to do. It’s the reason I absolutely adore her, because she has helped so much. The thought of doing something like going out to lunch and talking about personal things makes me cringe.
This is why there does have to be boundaries but they don’t usually have to be enforced as those boundaries happen naturally. I have talked in graphic detail with my best friend about things like relationships, real graphic detail, i’d never even think of saying anything like that to a professional.
Not to mention I have known each of the professionals I’ve mentioned for up to 10 years and after all I’ve said, I have no idea the marital status of one of them, only know the status of one as she told me his name because we had gotten a kitten and named him the same name as her partners name. This is the first time I’ve even noticed or thought about it.
Everything about my life is relevant to the professional friendship so I tell them. Their private lives are not relevant. I’ve had a couple of personal stories they have used as an example to illustrate a point, but nothing else.
Professional friendships are always unequal in that respect. If you are a professional giving a service user irrelevant personal information you are doing it wrong.
it’s why I was so grossed out by Heidi Hibbett going into details about her gynae problems and going on about her younger boyfriend. I had no gynae problems, my recent op is because of pre cancerous cells which were only found this year. She crossed a boundary and it was incredibly uncomfortable.
There will always be people who for what ever reason cannot distinguish that boundary, and then it is up to the professional to enforce that. I can remember a teacher at school who was really great with the students, really friendly, a girl in one of my classes mistook that for something else, ended up writing the teacher a love letter. The teacher and school responded appropriately.
I am certain there are plenty of cases where parents or older children have been unable to distinguish that boundary with social workers, and then it is vital that the boundary is enforced. There are cases where social workers have not respected boundaries and had relationships with service users. That is never acceptable because of the power difference.
Given my extensive experience with professionals, plenty of whom i’ve had hugs with, and some of whom have hugged my children, Vince Pearts latest article concerns me.
That is not a hard and fast rule though and, as we have learned this week, one person’s definition of friendly is completely different to another’s. For some, “a long heartfelt hug” is simply a sign of friendliness and a much-needed comfort at a trying time. For others, it is a highly inappropriate invasion of personal space.
He’s taken ‘a long heartfelt hug’ from here:
The long heartfelt hug that is mentioned in the tribunal was one of a series of incidents with a particular child that it is really clear was not appropriate. It is clear that the social worker had some degree of personal feelings for the child outside of the professional relationship and she acted on those feelings by giving the child gifts and also the long heartfelt hug.
A professional giving a long heartfelt hug is absolutely fine if it is needed and for the sole benefit of the service user, if it is for the benefit of the social worker, as it appears to be in the tribunal case, it is wrong, very very wrong and crosses so many boundaries it’s unreal.
When I was 9 I was alone in a room with a catholic priest who gave me a long heartfelt hug. I was crying and really upset, I needed a hug so he hugged me, absolutely nothing inappropriate about it. In fact you would have to be a devoid of compassion if you’d been in that room with me in the state I was in and not tried to comfort me, For the record, he died a couple of years ago of old age and there has never been one single issue raised about him by anyone. He saw a crying child and comforted that child.
If he’d given me a long heartfelt hug under any other circumstance, that would have been extremely not good.
Vince having been a social worker for over 10 years and not being aware of these things is odd. If a child needs a hug then you hug that child. It does more for the child than anything you could say to try and soothe that child. His coldness regarding the service users he sees isn’t great. I would not want anyone who would not be prepared to provide physical comfort to one of my children if they needed it to be anywhere near my children.
So this has been a long post.
At this point in time, given what i’ve read today and before, it’s just so depressing. I know there is a problem in recruiting and retaining social workers, but I think it would be better for service users if some of those social workers currently working left social work completely.
If you hate the job so much that all you ever do is write about how hard it is and how bad it effects you, that will effect the vulnerable people you work with.
To be fair I have no faith in Essex County Council to provide any kind of help whatsoever, but i’ve already written off the meeting with this social worker on the 3rd
The view of social work that social workers give to the public is that the job is hard, it’s awful and they hate their job. Given the public are at the centre of their work, it’s clear that the view the public take away is that the social workers hate the service users as they are integral to the job.
How can you complain that the public doesn’t view social workers as heroes when every week we are being told how much they hate the job?
Meanwhile you have Nurses who are absolutely dedicated to the job having a crisis because they have no choice but to strike as they are so poorly paid, yet feel they are letting people down by striking.
This isn’t actually a post against Social Work News or any of their writers, those two articles were just the straw that broke the camels back regarding what i’ve been reading online about what social workers have been saying about the job.
As a service user reading this stuff i’m feeling despondent.
Meanwhile my mind is going back to last Thursday after I had an operation, i woke up with an oxygen mask and I kept on repeatedly asking the nurse why I felt so drowsy and sleepy. Bless her, she just kept on repeating that I was just waking up from a general anaesthetic so I was going to feel like that. Which made absolutely no sense to me, so I kept on asking her. I’ve just recalled that I told her that I can’t feel like that as I need to get home.
I am genuinely thinking of cancelling the appointment with the social worker on the 3rd January, I really cannot see the point.