Relational Practice: Love in Professional Practice
The case for love
Increasingly, the concept of love is becoming a focal point in policy for care experienced young people. Notably, The Independent Care Review in Scotland emphasised the importance of love right from its inception through to its recommendations, leading to its inclusion in The Promise to care experienced children and young people that ‘you will grow up loved, safe and respected’. Similarly, the Independent Children’s Social Care Review in England used the term ‘love’ throughout, culminating in the government’s response titled Stable Homes, Built on Love. Whilst policy cannot dictate that young people growing up in care will feel loved, it can create an environment where love, care and compassion can flourish. It encourages us to place love at the heart of relational practice with care experienced young people. So what might a focus on love mean in practice? Why might it matter? And how can we achieve it?
Discussing love in professional settings can feel uncomfortable or countercultural. Many of us are conditioned to shy away from conversations about emotions, particularly about love. And for care-experienced young people, love is often intertwined with complex conflictual emotions and trauma. This complexity underscores its importance and relevance to practice. As Stanley (2020) explains, ‘by experiencing attuned care, children learn to internalise trust in themselves and in the outer world, they gain a sense of themselves as worthy of love (as ‘loveable’) and learn what it is to love’.
Love in practice
Love is multi-faceted in that it can be connected to a broad variety of relationships. Young people contributing to the Scottish Care Review, talked about love in terms of
- ‘Being cared for, listened to, talked to, not judged
- Being given time
- Being trusted and believed in, being supported and ‘stuck by’ when times are hard
- Feeling safe and kept from harm
- Having physical affection, touch, warmth and hugs
- Feeling a sense of belonging
Thus, children and young people describe love as something which arises out of their personal relationships, and is made manifest through the expression of feelings, attitudes, actions, words and behaviours of those with whom they are emotionally close.’ (p. 829) These descriptions suggest that love in relational practice isn’t so much about what we say but rather about what we do and how we make young people feel about themselves, their relationship with us and others.
Research affirms the significance of love to care experienced children and young people. The Baker Review (2017) and Dickson et al (2009) highlight how important love is to young people. This quote included in the Scottish Care Review stands out:
‘My person [name of person] believes in me completely. Always there for me. Don’t get to see her often but I know that she loves me. I trust her with everything. She’s my rock and has never judged me. Stood by me even in my darkest memories. She taught me how to trust again. Continually reminds me of how strong I am and gives me hope. Regardless of what happens I know I’ll get through it. She loves me and it’s the best feeling in the world.’
In the below conversation, Jonny Masters (Young People’s Participation and Development Worker at The National House Project) talks about why he feels love is important in relational practice with care experienced young people and how we can show love in ways that are professionally informed:
Love as a professional ethic
‘We need to reclaim the concept of love, not as an abstract, all embracing, fantasy but as a set of ethics, principles, values and behaviours. A love that is justice in action.’ (bell hooks)
In addition to what young people tell us about how important love is to them, there is also an ethical professional argument to be made about the relevance of love for relational practice. In particular, Leadbeater (2020) argues that some of the most effective solutions for supporting people combine love with power, using both as creative generative forces. It’s not a sentimental kind of love but about being ‘generous and kind; forgiving and understanding. But it is also demanding and ambitious. It does not seek a reward but it does set high expectations. Making good on such a commitment, however, means taking the time to get to know someone – their full story, not just their presenting symptoms – and seeing the person “in the round”, not merely the case or the condition. That requires building trust, because many of the people who engage with these solutions [projects connecting love and power] feel vulnerable and isolated.’ (p.10)
This care ethics argument for including love in professional practice is woven through articles in the joint special issue on this theme by the Scottish Journal of Residential Child Care and the International Journal of Social Pedagogy.
For professionals working with care experienced young people, embracing love as a guiding principle is both a moral and practical imperative. Love in practice is not just about nurturing – it is about empowering young people to see themselves as worthy of care, trust, and belonging. This ethos transforms relationships and enables young people to enjoy a positive sense of well-being and to build loving relationships with other people in their Relational Universe.
The Resource:
There is a scarcity of conceptual frameworks that might help us reflect on love, what it might mean to different people and how we might express love in ways that are appropriate and meaningful. Whilst originally conceived for a family counselling context, Gary Chapman’s Five Love Languages has been expanded and applied to a broad variety of different settings and can offer some valuable considerations. Its fundamental idea is that people express and receive love in different ways, and understanding these can improve relationships, including in a professional context. In order to connect meaningfully, we need to ensure we speak the same love language. Chapman suggests that there are five distinct love languages:
- Words of Affirmation: This love language is centred around verbal expressions of love, appreciation, and encouragement. People who prefer this language feel loved when they hear kind words, compliments, and affirmations. In a professional context, for a care experienced young person this might mean that the words we choose can make them feel loved and valued, provided these are genuine sentiments. This could be about a small gesture like sending a text message of encouragement.
- Acts of Service: For these individuals, actions speak louder than words. They feel loved when others do things for them, such as helping with tasks, making their lives easier, or showing thoughtfulness through effort. In professional practice, this might encourage us to consider how we can show love, care and kindness through our actions. Baking a young person’s favourite muffins or taking time out to help them paint their studio could be an act of service that shows them they are important to us.
- Receiving Gifts: People with this love language feel valued when they receive tangible gifts, which can be symbolic or thoughtful. It’s not about materialism, but about the meaning and effort behind the gift. This might be as small as sending a physical birthday card to a young person who doesn’t normally receive any mail, putting a more personal touch on a small Christmas gift, or giving them a framed photo from your last residential so they can hang it on their wall.
- Quality Time: This love language emphasizes undivided attention. People who value quality time feel loved when they spend meaningful time together, free from distractions, engaging in shared activities or deep conversations. For care experienced young people, this might mean feeling that we’re there without an agenda, just because we enjoy spending time with them: playing a video game together on our next visit or going for a walk in the local park rather than just phoning them for a conversation.
- Physical Touch: This love language revolves around physical closeness and touch. Hugs, kisses, holding hands, or other forms of physical affection are the primary ways people with this love language feel connected and loved. Whilst more intimate forms of physical touch will not be appropriate in a professional context, there is a whole variety that might well be sending the message to a care experienced young person that they are loveable: giving someone a hug, braiding their hair, patting them on the back, high-fiving them are just a few examples of how we can use physical touch to show someone that they matter.
Sure, some of these ways of showing love will be more time-consuming, especially if we’re not so fluent in a particular Love Language. It is a bit like learning a new language, or rather a new set of behaviours, which does take time. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why it is important that we call it love rather than use any euphemisms. Love is paramount for all human beings, and giving a care experienced young person a sense of being loved, and deserving of love, is most definitely time well spent. If our practice doesn’t help meet their need to feel loved, then it’s likely that any targets we hit will miss the point.
How might you use this resource?
In showing love, it’s important to consider the 3 Ps (introduced in this previous blog) to ensure that we’re not blurring the boundaries between the personal and the private. In other words, us showing love is about the young person’s need to feel loved and loveable rather than our own need for this. It needs to be professionally underpinned by a clear sense of why we show love and our ability to communicate this to young people, colleagues and others.
Some ideas for action:
- Have a conversation within your team about what love in professional practice means to each of you. Why might it be important to show love? How important is love to the young people you support? What might be their experience of feeling loved? Are there ways in which you and your colleagues can help them have a healthy understanding and positive experience of love?
- You can use the Five Love Languages as a mental model to understand your own ways of expressing and receiving love, reflecting on what behaviours of others you interpret as love and which might you not recognise so easily as their way of showing love. If you struggle to identify your own Lovel Language, you can take the official test. Although this is about private couple relationships and the full results are behind a paywall, it might give you some insights that are also transferable to your practice. It’s good to start from your own perspective before considering the young people you support and which Love Languages they might be more fluent in.
- Make a list of ways in which you could express love in each of the Five Love Languages in your particular practice context. You could also do this with your team as part of the following activity.
- If it’s possible in the context of your relationship with a young person, have a conversation about what love means to them and how they know when someone loves them – not necessarily in a romantic sense but more widely than that.
- If you did some mapping on a young person’s Relational Universe before, consider (either on your own or with them) how love might show up across the different relationships.
Where can you find out more?
Find out more here:
- The Independent Care Review in Scotland includes an entire section on love here.
- Leadbeater’s report Love Meets Power outlines various projects across the UK and Australia that integrate compassion (love) with effective influence (power) and shows why this is essential for creating meaningful social change.
- Love in Professional Practice is a joint special issue by the Scottish Journal of Residential Child Care and the International Journal of Social Pedagogy
- In her Rewriting Social Care blog, Bryony Shannon writes eloquently on love here, here and here.
- Relational Activism includes social work professionals and parents with lived experience of the child protection system in Camden, who have been working on bringing love into the social care system. Their annual events Love Shows Up are documented here.
This blog is part of a series of resources drawing on the peer learning programme and containing young people’s views, evidence and case studies of why working relationally is important for practice with care experienced young people.
The resources are accompanied by a series of webinars, where you can learn more and discuss how to put them into practice.