“The Challenges Will Remain”: Systemic Work with Families of Children Needing Extra Care

This chapter describes a variety of systemic practices with families with children that need extra care and where these family and child challenges will probably remain in some way or another. Work with families where children suffer with chronic conditions is viewed as a practice domain that demands a very broad range of systemic skills made available in the service of the whole family and its constituent parts. In addition, it also addresses the performance of these skills as part of a co-ordinating function aimed at enhancing the connectedness of the family’s helping system as a whole. How can good systemic interventions in such family contexts be characterized? What do these interventions look like? The chapter also describes systemic interventions that are responsive to the challenges arising from the poorly coordinated systems of help that surround these families.