Hidden Harm - Parental Substance Misuse, Parental Mental Ill-Health and Domestic Abuse

Parental substance misuse, mental ill-health and domestic abuse can all have a huge impact on a child’s safety and wellbeing. These hidden harms can threaten a child’s feeling of security and create challenging long-term problems.

This course will help you learn ways to reduce the likelihood of a child in your care suffering this hidden harm.

This eight module course provides a detailed awareness of hidden harm (toxic trio) and how it affects parents and children.

This course will give learners excellent knowledge of the issues that affect children living with hidden harm.

It will help the learner understand the cycle of events each hidden harm stressor produces, and highlights how to spot signs of harm and appropriate times to break this cycle of events to safeguard the child.

Upon completion of this course, the learner will understand:

• What hidden harm is, the hidden harm stressors and how they are related
• The impact of domestic abuse on parenting and pregnancy
• Maternal domestic abuse
• The impact of mental ill-health
• Substance misuse
• The impact on infants and children
• Crisis theory and its impact on children
• Container-contained relationship theory and secure attachment and reflective functioning theories
• Eliciting key information safely
• Approaches to information gathering
• Structuring assessments

This course is made up of the following modules:

• The trio of vulnerabilities
• Impact on parenting
• Impact on babies
• Impact on children
• Understanding the family
• Working with parents
• Assessing risk to the child
• Helping the child