Parallel Perspectives:

Deprioritizing Hard-to-Engage Families

Reder, Duncan, & Gray (1993)

It’s mid-afternoon.

Your calendar is full.
Your inbox — fuller.
The blinking red light of voicemails taunting you. 

Leadership’s reminders echo: Meet timelines. Stay on top of documentation. Keep things moving.

You glance at the backlog of reports, forms awaiting signatures, boxes still unchecked.

You open your task list.

You scan the names.

There it is…

…That family.

A brief pause.

A small exhale.

You move them down the list

“I’ll call tomorrow.”
“There are bigger fires.”
“They don’t answer anyway.”

Relief follows.

This is the nature of the work, right?

And yet — almost imperceptible — something else surfaces.

You’ve done this before.

Urgency explains part of it.
But not all of it.

There’s something lingering.
The soft itch of an unasked question:

“Why…”

Identifying the PD: Research

Professional Dangerousness (PD) is not about the occasional rearranging of priorities. In human service work, unpredictability is expected. Emergencies happen. Fires must be put out.

The danger is not in the behavior alone.

It’s in the WHY.

Reder, Duncan, and Gray (1993) identified how professionals can unconsciously drift toward reduced engagement with resistant or hard-to-access families — particularly when anxiety is high and accountability pressures mount. In such cases, avoidance becomes subtle and procedural. Contact attempts are delayed. Risk signals are minimized. Engagement becomes reactive rather than relational.

The behavior looks rational– normal– expected.

PD often lives in this space — where internal discomfort quietly shapes external decision-making.

Not because we don’t care.

But because caring feels costly.

Parallel Perspectives

Jess

For Jess, engagement had always been a strength. She was known for it. Praised for it. It became part of her professional identity as the “high engager” — the one who could connect, who could build rapport, who could move relationships forward.

So when a particular parent felt hard to engage, she experienced it as a significant contrast. As resistance. As something they were or were not doing.  Even while she noticed his frustration, mistrust, and grief — his humanity — she felt herself stepping back.  She could see the weight of his life pressing through every interaction, the fear, the pain, the guardedness, and yet she hesitated.

He’s difficult to talk to.
He’s hard to engage.

Always making it about what he was not capable of doing in relationship, never looking at what might be her barrier to relationship building with him.  Without realizing it, she shifted the burden onto him. The to-do list reflected that shift. His name moved lower — not dramatically, not intentionally — just subtly and consistently.

Underneath it wasn’t apathy. It was fear.

If engagement was her greatest strength, what did it mean when it didn’t come easily?
What did that say about her?...

Brë

For Brë, the contrast was with families who refused to fake it — those who didn’t want to engage in performative politeness. Every interaction felt like an uphill battle; even the thought of them was exhausting.

She believed she was there to be the solution. That was the job description, right? 

Show up. Assess. Fix. Close.

The families who slowed that down — who challenged, resisted, or questioned — became inconvenient to survival in a system where success was set by rules she didn’t make, but felt she had to live by.

So they quietly slipped lower on the list.

It wasn’t spiteful or a means of punishment. 

It was fear.

Fear of consequences — real or perceived, heavy all the same.

And yet, in that same moment, she could see them — grieving, guarded, angry, afraid. Their pain was visible, their struggles real. She felt it, regardless of the system telling her not to honor it. And still, the expectation remained: set aside emotions, comply, keep moving. The work had to get done — Productivity was to be prioritized over people.

If the system’s priorities weren’t human, what did that mean for the humanity in her work?...

Common Ground: Clarity in the Contrast

There was always a moment of contrast for both of us. A subtle prickling when a name surfaced. A sensation that felt easier to override than to explore or lean into.

But what we now know is this: Prickling is Purposeful & Contrast brings Clarity.

PD often begins when we override that invitation.  When we ignore the internal signal and externalize the burden.  When we let our discomfort become someone else’s delay.

Awareness changes that. Once you see it — you cannot unsee it.  And with this knowing comes agency and choice.  For both of us, awareness shifted everything.  Jess leaned into repair — owning the delay and re-engaging with humility.  Bre had to confront her “why” of the work.  Deciding if it was going to be driven by people or determined by performance measures.  Only when we were honest with ourselves about the realities, were we able to honor the necessary reprioritization that followed. 

The families at the bottom suddenly moved to the top.  Not performatively, but intentionally.  And in those moments, we grew.  As professionals, in practice, and as humans. 

PD is not eliminated by pushing aside the prickling.

It is interrupted by awareness — when we are willing to see ourselves as clearly as we see others.

Reflective Prompts

• When you scan your current to-do list, who or what consistently moves down — and what feeling accompanies that decision?

• Where might discomfort be inviting avoidance rather than growth?

• If awareness reshapes priority, what would intentionally moving someone “to the top” look like in your practice this week?