The first few hours and days of safety planning offer the greatest leverage for quickly getting a strong safety network and plan around the children. If we leave children in danger, even for just a few hours, how do we come back later and get people invested in doing something to make the children safer? If children are removed without giving parents a fair chance to make their children safe enough in their home, they’ll most often be too angry and crushed for a time to courageously call the people in their naturally occurring network for help. They likely won't be very open to working with the social worker who took their children. But if we immediately get more adults around the children and get a good enough network and plan to keep the children safe overnight, through the weekend, or through the next week, everybody involved will be in a better place to do the work that needs to be done, and to do it together.
There are other benefits to getting an immediate safety network around the children. Network members can help parents make a plan so the things they worry about, things their relatives and friends worry about, and/or things the child protection system is worried might happen, don't happen. If any of the things anyone is worried about do happen, things will get worse fast. Things will be worse for the children, for their parents, for all of the people who care about the children, and for the child protection system that is supposed to make sure bad things don't happen to children. When there is a safety network, members can do a lot of things that help the children and their parents. Network members can do things for the children and the family that a social worker will surely end up doing if there isn't a network. Whenever a social worker is involved with a family that has a safety network in place, that worker will have more time to listen to the parents and children and to do more of the things that are truly helpful to the children and parents.
If you are a social worker learning to do safety planning with families it likely feels overwhelming to think about getting a network involved with every family. If this is the case, can you make it urgent to get a network every time you start working with a new family? If not, can you do it with every other family? Or every third family? The more you do it, the better you'll get at it and the faster it will go. Once every family has a network around the children, your job will be far easier, and then getting a network around every new family will seem more doable.