ABSTRACT
Making clinical assessments of families is a complex task, requiring attention to details of the family’s history, observing present relationships, looking at the developmental needs of the child, making a judgement about parenting capacity as well as the parents’ personality, while all the time trying to see, often through a mass of paperwork and information of varying reliability, what is in the child’s best interests. Maintaining a capacity to think and reflect is essential to the assessor, and finding such a capacity, however limited, in the family being assessed is a hopeful sign of the possibility of change. After all, a fundamental aim of assessment is to see how much a family is capable of change. But assessing change can be difficult, provoke very different views in professionals, and may need a certain amount of time and an open attitude of mind, the latter being particularly difficult when both the family and the professional network have already made up theirs.
