Serving families living in poverty: A cross-national exploration of challenges and enabling conditions in child welfare practice

This article presents findings from a cross-national qualitative study that examined how frontline practitioners engage with poverty in their everyday work with families with children. Drawing on qualitative responses to four open-ended questions from an international survey (n = 634), the study brought together practitioner accounts from ten countries: Australia, China, Germany/Switzerland,22Germany and Switzerland were grouped together in the analysis due to the shared language (German) and the significant overlap in the data collection and analysis process, which was conducted by the same researcher. Israel, Italy, Portugal, Spain, the UK, and the US. Using a multi-stage collaborative analytic process, we identified five recurring challenges and five enabling conditions that shape poverty-related practice across diverse welfare contexts. Practitioners consistently described gaps between families’ material needs and available resources, alongside bureaucratic and policy constraints that limited timely and relational responses. Poverty was experienced as intensifying complexity, fragmenting support, and complicating trust-building in relationships shaped by stigma and surveillance. At the same time, relational practice, access to concrete resources, professional flexibility, justice-oriented theoretical frameworks, and interagency collaboration were identified as key enabling conditions of effective work. Despite differences in welfare systems, the findings reveal striking cross-national convergence in how poverty structures frontline practice. The study contributes cross-national, practice-based evidence relevant to social service design, professional education, and policy.