Assessing The “Millennial Self-Care Obsession” Among Social Workers: #NotSoMuch

Abstract

Summary Despite the importance of self-care to social work practice, misnomers about the construct persist. One misperception is that millennials are overly focused on self-care and engage in high-levels of self-care, to the detriment of performing work duties. This study examined the self-care practices of social work practitioners (N = 3079) in the United States. Researcher investigated self-care practices across five domains: Professional Support, Professional Development, Life Support, Cognitive Awareness, and Daily Balance. Findings Overall, data suggest that social workers in all generations engaged in moderate amounts of self-care. Analyses revealed that millennials engaged in significantly fewer self-care practices related to Professional Support and Daily Balance, when compared to Generation X and Baby-boomer participants. While not statistically significant, millennials scored lower across all other self-care domains. Applications This is the first known study to explicitly investigate generational differences in self-care within any professional discipline. Within the next five years, millennials will make up nearly 75% of the world’s workforce. Findings from this research suggest the need to reshape prevailing anecdotes about self-care and millennials. Further, data offer insights to organizations looking to better support social workers of all generations in engaging in self-care.

Coping and self-care: Mediating the association of job stressors with vicarious trauma and vicarious resilience

“…As individual responses, the results of the present study suggest the need to increase personal resources, such as self-care practices (Cuartero & Campos-Vidal, 2019;Kim et al, 2022;Knight, 2019;Miller & Grise-Owens, 2021;Molnar et al, 2020;Quinn et al, 2019), recovery and meditation (Pandya, 2021), and adaptive coping strategies (Akinsulure-Smith et al, 2018;Ben-Ezra & Hamama-Raz, 2021;Rauvola et al, 2019). This would prevent and decrease service providers' vicarious trauma symptoms (Kim et al, 2022).…”

“…Self-care is attained through certain practices in the personal and professional dimensions of the self (Lee et al, 2020;Miller et al, 2018Miller et al, , 2020Miller & Grise-Owens, 2021). Personal self-care includes strategies and actions that promote psychological health and well-being, such as building supportive relationships, accepting help from others, or enhancing pleasure.…”

Rendering Services in Child and Youth Care Centres: Experiences and Challenges of Social Workers

“…Miller (2020) postulated that social workers working with children face higher caseloads, compassion fatigue and burnout, which may influence the rendering of effective services to this vulnerable population. Research findings support the experience of multifaceted stress factors in social workers' service delivery, which may harm their personal and work-related environments (Guarnaccia et al, 2020;Miller, Grise-Ownes, & Pachner, 2018;Miller, 2020). If the adverse impact of work-related pressures on social workers' well-being is not addressed, the result can be high staff turnover and low work satisfaction (Shier et al, 2012).…”

“…Therefore, social workers need support structures and self-care strategies to mitigate the effects of their challenging work environment. Furthermore, Miller et al (2018) stated that social workers not only have to deal with huge workloads but simultaneously with other stressors, such as a lack of resources, which may lead to them experiencing burnout and compromise the effectiveness of service delivery. Therefore, providing sufficient support structures will be crucial in assisting social workers in rendering effective services in CYCCs.…”