Family keyworker as a non‐clinical and democratic figure to support hard‐to‐reach families from an attachment perspective

Abstract

We express gratitude to both Silvia Lordello and Daniel J. Puhlman for their insightful comments on our paper entitled "The Family Keyworker as a Critical Element for Attachment Resilience in the Face of Adversity" (Ber astegui & Pitillas, 2024). Lordello's and Puhlman's observations and concerns regarding our application of an attachment lens to the work of family keyworkers (FKWs) provide us with an opportunity to nuance and better explain our proposal, within what we consider a fruitful academic and technical discussion. Discussing these issues in the context of a commented paper is enriching, both to the academic debate and to the field of intervention with families. We sincerely thank Dr. Lordello and Dr. Puhlman for their attentive reading of our work, and hope that our responses to their comments may do justice to the very valuable points that they present.

Celebrating the “good‐enough families”: Family challenges and resilience during global adversity

“…Although we, as scholars, tend to agree that theories must be useful in both explaining and ameliorating the lives of real families (Allen & Henderson, 2022), the ways in that it must happen are a subject of ongoing debate. The most vivid example of this was the article by Ber astegui and Pitillas (2024) who proposed the use of an attachment framework to both support and be applied by family keyworkers, a professional figure that exists (or a proxy) in some countries, but it is not universal (e.g., Ber astegui & Pitillas, 2024;Lordello, 2024;Puhlman, 2024).…”