ROTTERDAM, 26 January 2026 – A Rotterdam-based family support worker has been nominated for a Hartenhuis Award from children’s charity Het Vergeten Kind (The Forgotten Child). Sharon Plet, an outreach family support professional at Gezin VoorOp, is recognised in a category focused on preventing unnecessary out-of-home placements.
Het Vergeten Kind presents the Hartenhuis Awards each year to people who make an exceptional contribution to vulnerable children in the Netherlands. This year’s encouragement prize spotlights “attentive care professionals” who keep the whole family in view, with the aim of avoiding unnecessary out-of-home placements. The research-based nomination announcement was shared after the findings were presented at WTC Rotterdam, as part of a broader focus on strengthening support around families before crises escalate.
What Sharon Plet is nominated for
Plet works as an ambulant family support worker at Gezin VoorOp, and is a strong advocate of trauma-sensitive in-home support (Trauma Sensitieve thuisbegeleiding) as a way to help families stabilise and stay together when it is safe to do so. The person who nominated her describes her as “an empathetic perseverer with a lot of decisiveness”.
Plet sums up her approach in a single line: “Parents are the captain of their ship.”
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Working with parents before things break
Plet argues that support for parents should come earlier, including help to address their own trauma, so the home situation can become healthier. “Children’s behaviour is often a mirror, it comes from somewhere because every behaviour is communication,” she says.
She also describes why she prefers working in the home setting: “I am intensively involved and, because of that, I get to know the child and parents well. That is how I discover how they see the world and understand their behaviour.”
When safety depends on being reachable
Plet says she is reachable at different moments, including evenings and weekends, when things can go wrong at home. “That helps, especially when behaviour stems from trauma. That increases a feeling of safety.”
Part of the work, as she describes it, is helping parents move from analysis back to feeling: “Parents who no longer ‘feel’ are out of connection.” From there, she says, the next step is a clear family plan with practical steps, factors, interventions and desired outcomes, with one goal in mind: “Trust, and that is essential to prevent an out-of-home placement.”
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Why the awards focus on out-of-home placements
The Hartenhuis Awards are presented during the Week of Het Vergeten Kind (Week van Het Vergeten Kind), which runs from 29 January to 4 February 2026. During that week, the foundation is drawing attention to out-of-home placements it views as avoidable, including through a petition.
The foundation’s message is that out-of-home placement can be unavoidable in some situations, but that many cases reflect broader family pressures such as poverty, debt, mental health problems, or a high-conflict separation. It argues that families need connected support that looks at the full picture, including environment, and says stronger national direction, including a Minister for Youth and Family (Minister voor Jeugd en Gezin), would help make that support more consistent.
What happens next
Winners are chosen per region (Midden, Zuid and Noord), and the awards ceremony takes place on 2 February at TivoliVredenburg in Utrecht.
For Rotterdam, the nomination puts a spotlight on what many families here will recognise: when support is personal, consistent, and grounded in what parents and children actually need, the pressure can ease before decisions become irreversible.
