Maria, who was usually carrying one of the children, often apologized for the condition of the home, we tried to comfort her by informing her that we were not there to judge the condition of the home, although we were required to assess but that we were there to help her and her family. Maria took a few minutes to formulate her response and then said “yeah I need the help, you know, it’s a lot for me”. It has been a long time since I had all the children together at once since the three oldest were in foster care. I only had to look after the three little ones, and sometimes I have Krystal’s father help me clean the house and take care of the children, but he lives in Staten Island now so he can’t be with us all the time”. I feel like sometimes …show more content…
In retrospect, the goals that were created with Maria may have only further added to the mounting pressure in her life. My need to follow a model based approach, meet three times a week and uphold stakeholder requirement coupled with automatically asserting my professional knowledge (unintentionally) regarding how to approach her circumstances may have diminished Maria’s own meaning of the situation. It is interesting to note that the same way that Maria may have felt overwhelmed or pressured to meet “her goals” is the same way that her own service providers felt pressured to “help” Maria meet her goals. At first Maria was able to accomplish the set goals, she took the children to their psychiatric and physical evaluations, Maria was ensuring that Joel and Ana where attending school, and utilized outside resources such as food pantries, diaper and clothing banks (not to mention the school materials, food, clothing, and diapers that ACS often donated to the