Podcast season 4: Episode 9 – Using timelines in life story work

Please note that this transcript is auto-generated and therefore will contain some errors and natural pauses in conversation.

Trailer: [00:00:00] Hello. This is a reminder that as well as listening to this show on a browser via the Creative Life Story Work website. You can also listen to it on your favorite audio app too. You’ll find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Audible, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, and many others. Search Creative Life Story Work podcast.

DAWN: Welcome to the Creative Life Story Work podcast, where we explore how to make life story work better for all care experienced children and young people. Creative life story work is an approach which can improve children and young people’s lives and their relationships with others, both at home and at school.

It’s based on the Rose model of therapeutic life story work. Every month we’ll explore a different aspect of creative life story work, and we’ll give insights into how you can use this approach to help care experience to children and young people make sense of their past and build a brighter future. Today we are focusing on how using a timeline in life story work can support children and young people to explore their past, present, and future.

I’m absolutely delighted to welcome once again to our podcast studio, Polly Baynes. Polly has worked with children and families for 37 years as a residential social worker, local authority, social worker, independent chair, children’s guardian, and independent social worker. She is a research and practice associate and author of the Practice Guide to Life Story work.

Polly has delivered training, consultation and mentoring in life story work to social workers, foster carers, adopters, and kinship carers across the UK, and I’m thrilled to say she’ll be delivering our live classroom on June the 30th 2025 about using timelines in life story work. And you can find out more about that on our website, CreativeLifeStoryWork.com.

Polly, Hello and welcome to our podcast studio.

POLLY: Hello, Dawn. Thank you very much for inviting me. It’s lovely to be talking to Blue Cabin again.

DAWN: Lovely, lovely to have you here. I wondered if you’d like to share a little bit about your background and what led you to pursue a career in social work.

POLLY: I grew up in a family where my mom couldn’t look after me because she had a very serious mental illness, and I was brought up by my granny and auntie who were wonderful, amazing people. And then when I was 10, my mom’s psychiatrist said that for her to get better, it was important that her children went back to live with her. And that’s what happened to me and my brother. We went back home to live with my mom. Nobody asked us what we thought would be a good idea to happen to us, and nobody really explained what was happening.

And I think out of that experience, I developed a real sense of social justice and the important of listening to children and of involving them in decisions about their lives and I also over the years have come to understand that my history, if I’d have been in a different sort of family where I didn’t have a grandparent and a great aunt, I might well have ended up in care.

And it really also has taught me the experience, the importance of valuing children’s extended families as resources for them. Uh, it’s took me a long time really to realize that I kind of fell into the category of somebody who grew up in kinship care, but that is the, that’s part of my identity and a very positive one for me as well.

[00:04:00] So I came into the work with a kind of burning passion for children’s rights really, and for the importance of their views of the world being taken into account and for information being shared with them in a meaningful kind of way. And my first working role with children, having had a slightly less glorious, very short career in Rumble Lows and in Grenada TV rental.

Neither of these shops exist, I don’t think, but I, I don’t think my contributions directly to blame for that. But I went to work in a children’s home and I was just astonished to see the kind of relationships that the really skillful staff there built with children. I just was so interested in the way that they talked to them.

And the way that they answered their questions, they listened, but they did more than listen as well. The things that they said in response seemed really important to me.

[00:05:00] I, I just felt I could learn so much from these people. And that was the first time I heard about life story work because somebody came in and, and showed us how to do timelines with children.

And that was the beginning really of an ambition to become a therapeutic worker with children. I wanted to be a play therapist and specialize in life story work. And back then, to achieve that, you had to train to be a social worker first, or a teacher, or a nurse. You had to have a primary professional qualification.

And so that became my aim. I never really set out to be a social worker, which given that I’ve been one for over 35 years, shows how good I’m at sticking to plans. But I went on and encountered in my next residential placement, an amazing practitioner called Pauline Morrison (who last time I heard was still out there working), and we did group life story work with the children there.

[00:06:00] They were mostly aged between about 12 and 16 with very complicated backgrounds, and she just understood the importance of sharing your story with other people and of young people finding commonalities with each other in this very difficult, sometimes very hostile environment for these young people.

And she was a truly remarkable person I think, who continued to inspire me. And then I went off to train to be a social worker and I pursued my plan and got a specialist post while I was training to do play therapy. But what I discovered when I became purely in that therapeutic role was that I was listening to children’s internal worlds. I was hearing their stories, but I wasn’t really able to have much influence over the decisions that got made for them and the reality of their external worlds. And I found that quite frustrating. In social work sometimes you don’t have time to get to know the child and really understand their views, but then when you’re in a therapeutic role, you’re much more narrowly confined or, or that’s what I found back then. I also had some health problems and went back to working as a case-holding social worker in the local authority. But with this play therapy training behind me, what I did with that was to try to develop a way of working with children that it was possible to deliver within routine social work practice, so that every encounter was an opportunity for listening to children, for explaining things to them, using lots of the creative approaches that I’d learned on that training, using drawing, using play, using puppets, trying to find ways to integrate that into my practice and then actually when I became a children’s guardian working in the family court, that’s when I really felt I had the perfect balance because at that time, and this was quite some years ago now, there was enough time allowed for you as a practitioner to really get to know children, and your job was to present their views to the court.

[00:08:00] Also to think about them and to put those alongside your own opinions and so I really loved it. Sometimes you had quite short encounters with children and families in private law where people were separating, for example, working out ways to very quickly build up rapport. That’s when I developed my toolkit really of knitted people that I would use for helping to explain myself and for helping me to understand how children saw things and my big bag of toys of all different kinds, which I can remember one little girl saying to me “Does every social worker have a bag like this?” And I said, oh, no, I don’t think so. And she said, “Well, I think they should do.” And that’s when I knew I had some good stuff in my bag. I had little furry animals, I had monsters, I had witches fingers.

[00:09:00] It was just a mixture of everything. And it just allowed me to work out ways of communicating with children that brought together social work practice in terms of thinking and planning and seeing the big picture, and being able to make changes in the child’s external world with also using creative approaches at every stage of the work, not just in the bits of life story work that I was able to do.

In the sense that people tend to think of life story work as in planned formal sessions. Yes, and I went on and have been interested in all the roles that I’ve had. I’ve always been interested in the question, why does this child think they’re in care? And often when you ask that people look at you in in horror, just hoping somebody else has answered that question.

But I think if you’re growing up away from your mom and dad, that’s the burning question of your childhood really. And everybody around you needs to be willing to have a go answering it and answering not just in words, but also in children’s language: play, drawing, walking on the beach, chucking stones in the sea. It’s not just about talking.

[00:10:00] DAWN: Thank you Polly, and thank you for sharing your personal story to illuminate the impact of where that’s meshed in with your professional life. I think what you’ve done is very beautifully laid out why really good life story work is such a crucial part of working with children and young people, and I really like that you’d framed it into what is the burning question that every child has; why am I in care?

That is the nub of it, isn’t it? I also like the number of references you made to accidentally becoming a social worker. Maybe that’s what we should retitle this podcast, the Tale of the Accidental Social Worker.

[00:11:00] POLLY: What I should say is I feel incredibly lucky that I’ve had a working life that’s, yeah, that’s really been meaningful.

DAWN: Yeah. You’ve been able to bring in all the different perspectives that you’ve got and that they’re now honed into the work that you do as well. And they’ll all connect with each other as well, aren’t they?

POLLY: Yeah. The other thing I would say about social work is, which I think they should mention more in the recruitment, is that there is a chronic shortage of social workers. And what that means is that you can take risks with your career in ways that you can’t in other jobs, because if you’re basically doing an all right job and you’re a trustworthy, reliable person, you will always get another job. And so if you want to go and try something else or try being freelance or have a year off, you can do that. And there’s work there, and that gives you an amazing freedom. So it’s possibilities there – so many possibilities for exploring and playing actually isn’t there? And everything that you do, you bring back into the work.

[00:12:00] And I think it’s actually really healthy for people to, to a break and take a big breath and see what else is out there in the world. Because it’s tough. It’s very, very hard work.

DAWN: You started to talk about your toolkit that you’d got, and you mentioned some of the things in it, and I just wondered about the timeline in your toolkit and how that specifically, specifically contributes to life story work. What is it in your toolkit that you use, and how would a foster carer begin to use that?

POLLY: Yeah, I think one of the key things about timelines is the use of wallpaper because there, it’s such a wonderful material because of the way that it naturally rolls itself up. And puts itself away safely. And the way that the paper allows you to just open a bit of the story and look at that, or to cut it and stick another bit on, or to put your timeline next to somebody else’s, I just think the medium is the message.

[00:13:00] I think it’s that the way that when I’m running training and I get everybody to do a timeline when I’m running face-to-face training. And sometimes I’ve got the wallpaper out, sometimes people are just like, oh no, I’m just going to do it on a piece of A4, and well, I would never forbid somebody from doing that.

I really encourage that because there’s something about, look, there’s enough space here, expanse for use it. Yeah, it is an expanse. And also it goes on and on and you can leave space at the end. So it allows for future. But I think for me, human beings are story making creatures, and we tell stories about everything.

[00:14:00] It’s how we understand the world, and so we like to kind of say, this  happened and then this happened, and then this happened. The story in itself, the kind of beginning, middle end structure is something that we use all through our lives to make safe and make sense. Some really difficult, complicated things that happen to us, and we do that on a personal level, but also we have our family stories and we have our cultural stories and our stories of humanity and nation and you know, we just are creatures that like to make stories and the timeline. One of the other really important things, I think, is that when you start to draw a timeline, you’re looking at it on the piece of paper and the distance between you and the paper creates safety. And I think one of the things you’re doing all of the time in working with children and young people is establishing the appropriate distance from their story for them to feel safe to hear it and tell it.

[00:15:00] And with different children at different times, that changes. And sometimes you might use that partly by your choice of language, whether you are saying, you did this or Joseph did this, and sometimes I will be saying once upon a time, there was a little boy called Joseph, because some children’s stories are so difficult. They need to be really, really firmly contained in the narrative, but it, it puts the story out on the floor in front of you. It gives you something to both look at together so you don’t have to make eye contact.

And it, it just helps to make the telling of it safe. And it establishes the subject of the story. If you are the subject of a story, you are an important person whose life is worth attending to, and also in the timeline, the child is the center of the story.

[00:16:00] They’re the main character. Whereas in lots of other encounters when you’re a child particularly, but also in adulthood, you are a bit part player in someone else’s story or you know, one of the extras in the local authority film of its life, but in the timeline, you are center stage and everything that happens and everyone else who might feature in that story is relevant in terms of their impact on you and how you perceived them. I think that’s important for all of us as human beings in terms of having a sense of identity and place in the world.

But for children whose lives have been disrupted by adult difficulties, by lots of moves, who often blame themselves for bad things that have happened to them.

[00:17:00] Being re-centered at the middle of your own story and, and joining in with a child at looking at the world through their eyes and remembering where their eye level was at that moment is really key to helping them find a way of thinking about their past that isn’t full of blame and shame and self-loathing, and it literally embeds the child in time and in the way that childhood happens in time. So it, it kind of tells the story of a baby who became a toddler, who became a 6-year-old who, and so all along the way it gives you opportunities to remind the child you are a baby then. This is what babies need. This is what babies can do. You are a toddler. Toddlers don’t know how to cook their tea for their little brother. Six year olds don’t know how to make their dad better when he is taken lots of heroin. So you kind of, it allows you not just to tell the story of the events, but the story of the growing child.

DAWN: I love the way that you’re describing the timeline as the safe container that holds the story, but also you’re almost working in 3D in terms terms of setting boundaries. The way of framing the story gives better understanding of what it actually means. Let’s go to a break. So you can hear about our Creative Life Story Work membership offer.

Trailer: We want people to gain more of an understanding about what it’s like to be care experienced and to have a better understanding of what it actually means. Could Creative Life Story Work make a difference to the care experienced children and young people you work with? Maybe you’re a social worker. I think we forget at our peril that actually telling a child the story of their early life is one of the most profound uses of social work power that we could ever operate. Perhaps you’re a foster carer. You know, when they say it’s all about the child, it’s not because our experiences, it’s about the carer and the child and it just gives a new angle to our relationship because we’re learning about each other together.

A Creative Life Story Work membership will give you or your whole team access to resources.

[00:19:00] Including activities you can use in direct work with children and young people, training with life story work experts, and lots more. And I think a lot of our children are looking for meaning, looking for, you know, well why is it I feel this way when my, you know, my friends don’t? Why is it I get angry eternally? And my friends don’t. The greatest thing we see is when we are able to say to young people, this is your story, this is about who you are. And then children towards the end say, it’s not my fault that these things happened, but it is something that I can do something about.

And once we have that, then we know we can move forward.

Find out about our membership for individuals and for organizations on our website, creativelifestorywork.com.

[00:20:00] DAWN: You are very beautifully describing the rolling out of the physicality of rolling out of the timeline and going from being a baby through to the toddler, through to the 6-year-old. Do you use timelines to begin to think about changes in the future that might happen when you’re working with a child as well.

POLLY: Absolutely. I think it’s that linking together of past, present, and future is a really key asset of timelines because most of the children that we would do life story work with experienced so many changes that it can be really hard for them to hold onto a sense of enduring personal identity because they move between different worlds and often those moves have been unplanned and been caused by very difficult crises.

[00:21:00] So when in the work we have an opportunity to prepare a child for a move to plan for that, not only are we supporting them with that move, but we are trying to, we rework some of their sense of the world being entirely unpredictable.

And so when we start to use the timeline to look at something like a move into a new family, what we are using it for partly is to enable the child to express their fears, their hopes, their understanding, their misunderstanding about what that that might mean. It can open up a new kind of conversation about what the future might look like.

And also more broadly, after the end of a, you know, quite a long piece of work with a child who’s in a family where they’re staying, finishing off the work by looking at what are their dreams for the future and what might go on the end of this timeline and conveying a sense that they won’t be forgotten by you either, is really important in that, but it, it can allow them to explore and, and physically play out sometimes moves both in the past but also in the future.  You can use the timeline a bit like one of those maps that children have for playing with cars on the floor. So you might start with the paper, but then have cars, people to play out the past as well as draw it, but also to play out what might be happening in the future and, and allow children to express their fears and hopes about that through play, as well as through talking. So they’ll often show you what they’re worrying about or hoping for by moving the people or the car or whatever to, to try out whether something might be possible.

[00:23:00] DAWN: I can almost visualize the session that you are describing there with the kit all on the floor.

What advice would you give to somebody who might be listening to this podcast or in your live classroom who feels a bit unsure or a bit overwhelmed by starting working in this way? What would your top tips be? Your advice on starting working like that?

POLLY: My top tips would be if you’re gonna do something with a child, always do it on yourself first, because if you do your own timeline, then you will genuinely understand the emotional impact of doing a timeline. If you’ve got colleagues or friends who are doing okay at the moment and might be prepared to help you, you can ask them to have a practice on an adult if you don’t have a training course where you can practice practicing, giving the instructions, practicing listening.

[00:24:00] I would say practice. Make sure you know as much as possible of the child’s story before you meet them because you need to convey a sense of confidence in knowing the name of their brother, those, those kind of basic details. Have some interesting kit, because what appeals to you might not be what appeals to a child and what appeals to one child might not be the same for the next one. Stickers I find particularly helpful not just amongst children, but in with adults when I’m doing running training where people have to do their timelines, people who feel worried about drawing often really happy to use stickers and you can get some brilliant packs of, of stickers, put everything in a box because however much a child doesn’t want to work with you or is just fed up of one more social worker coming, if you turn up with a big interesting looking box, they’re gonna want to know what’s inside it. So that’s a real tip I think is a box that you can’t see inside. Go with a plan.

But also be prepared to just totally chuck that plan away and do whatever needs to be done that day. Never think of playing as wasting time. If you’re bouncing on the trampoline, playing noughts and crosses, being taught how to play Fortnite, kicking a football, you’re doing social work, you’re doing life story work, because rapport building is absolutely essential, and it’s your chance to learn the child. Only by learning the child will you know how to deliver the work and be kind to yourself. You’ll mess it up. You’ll say the wrong thing. You’ll give a clumsy response. If you get something wrong, just say. Oh, I’m sorry. That was a mistake. Let me try again.

Really good modeling for children about it being okay to make mistakes.

[00:26:00] And if you don’t know the answer to something, just say so and say, you’ll go and try and find out. Don’t make promises you can’t keep. It’s always better to under promise and over deliver. And have a go. I would say dip your toe in, have a go if it’s not the right day or if it’s too much for this child, or you are the wrong person, as long as you are being attentive to their response, not just their words, but their behavior. They will tell you it’s time to stop and you just need to listen and, and attend to the messages from some of the research with children about life story work, which is very much along the lines of, this is hard, but please keep trying.

Please keep trying to help me understand this, be in this with me. You are the person that is there for this child to answer this question.

DAWN: What a wise, wise list of top tips there, but I just think, we’ll, we’ll end on that, Polly on just be in this with me, as the key message should be taken to that foster carer or social worker to jump in and walk alongside that child and be in it with them. Thanks so much for our conversation today. I could talk to you for hours. Polly, sit another time.

POLLY: Thanks very much, Dawn.

DAWN: You are very welcome. You are delivering our live classroom in June. If people want to meet you in person on Zoom and have a go at doing their own timelines, whether you are a foster carer, someone who has experience with the care system, or you work with children and young people. We hope this episode has given you an insight into how we can make life story work better for young people and how you can use it in your own practice. You can find out more about Creative Life Story work on our website, creative life story work.com, and you can find us on LinkedIn and X @CreativeLSW.

Please do get in touch there with any comments or questions as we’d love to hear from you. If your podcast app allows you to please leave us a review as it really does help others to find our show. So until next month, bye for now.