The Essentials of the Helping Relationship between Social Workers and Clients Hagit Sinai-Glazer The helping relationship between a client and a practitioner is often described as the heart and soul in social work. This research explored the helping relationship between social workers and clients (the clients were mothers) in the context of public social services in Israel. The results presented here are part of a larger ethnographic study that included interviews with 14 social workers, 20 mothers who are clients, and extensive participant observations and textual analysis. Presented in this article are the results pertaining to the essential elements of the helping relationship as perceived by the research participants. Social workers and clients pointed to similar elements that comprise a good helping relationship: love and support; trust and feeling safe; listening and feeling understood; making an effort to help; humanness, compassion, and sensitivity; availability, continuity, and being there when needed; and chemistry. Participants’ accounts exemplify the importance and centrality of the helping relationship in social work. The article concludes with a discussion of the study’s implications for practice, policy, and research. KEY WORDS: clients who are mothers; ethnography; helping relationship; public social services; social work practice T he discipline of social work pays special tribute to the relationships between so- cial workers and clients. These relation- ships have been described as the heart, core, soul, and steering wheel of the profession since the 19th century (Richmond, 1899). Although the impor- tance of the helping relationship remained undis- puted in social work scholarship up until this day and age, several scholars pointed to the erosion of the helping relationship in social work and beyond. Marketization and managerialism, the twin forces of neoliberal agendas that merged in the West during the 1980s, veered the profession away from being client-centered and relationship-based (Coady, 1993; Ruch, 2010). Scholars claimed that the move away from the relationship has been det- rimental to the profession and its clientele (see, for example, Coady, 1993; Dybicz, 2012), calling “for a renewed emphasis on the worker–client relationship” in practice, education, and research (Coady, 1993, p. 295). My study focused on the helping relationship between social workers in public social services departments in Israel and clients of those depart- ments (the clients were mothers). Not only are women heavily represented as social services users in Israel (Ben-Simhon & Goran, 2017) and other parts of the world (House of Commons Library, 2014; Status of Women Canada, 2012; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2014), extensive scholarship also suggests a particularly complex and multilayered re- lationship between social workers and clients who are mothers in the context of child welfare and child protection. Narratives of mothers who are clients of welfare services suggest that they feel blamed for being “bad” or “unfit” by their social workers (see, for example, Hughes, Chau, & Poff, 2011; S. P. Johnson & Sullivan, 2008; Klease, 2008). Stephens (2019) recognized that child welfare–affected moth- ers often experience their involvement with child welfare services as traumatic. Thus, the prevalence of clients who are mothers in social services, along with the documented complexity of the relationships be- tween mothers and social workers, lead me to focus this inquiry on the helping relationship between social workers and their clients who are mothers. The results presented herein are part of a larger ethnographic study I conducted in Israel during 2016. The project, an extensive institutional eth- nography, traced the social organization of the helping relationship between social workers and clients who are mothers. The research question that guided the overall study was: “How does the social organization of a social services department doi: 10.1093/sw/swaa028 V C 2020 National Association of Social Workers 245 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/sw/article/65/3/245/5896072 by guest on 27 February 2021