A Watershed Perspective
FOR CHILD WELFARE
ew words appear more frequently in discussions of child welfare today than “upstream.” The term is pregnant with meaning, and anyone who cares deeply about our society’s most vulnerable children would do well to give it full attention. Upstream thinking invites us to consider the tragic dilemma that lies at the heart of childprotection efforts — namely the need for social workers to separate thousands of children from their birth parents. If we can address such crises before they’re full blown, maybe even before they become crises at all, we will prevent much heartache.
Upstream is, of course, a metaphor. The word contains an image, a virtual panorama of meaning. In the context of child welfare, the term “upstream” presents a story that goes something like this:
A goodhearted woman is standing on a riverbank when she sees a child floating in the river, about to drown. With great effort, she reaches the child and pulls him to safety. A moment later, she notices a second child caught in the current, and rescues him only just in time. Again and again the pattern of crisis-and-rescue is repeated. Finally, it dawns on the woman that children shouldn’t be adrift in the river in the first place.
Instead of spending all her energy tugging children out of the water, she heads upriver and stops them from falling into the water. By solving the problem at the source, she prevents children from finding themselves in harm’s way a more sophisticated and less costly solution that’s better for everyone involved.
All metaphors are rich in unstated assertions. Consider, for example, those conveyed by two different metaphors for seeking political office: “race” and “campaign.” The former calls to mind an athletic contest, implying that while competition may be fierce, certain rules and decorum remain essential. The latter suggests war, where any tactic used to destroy the opponent is permissible. Whichever of these two metaphors forms our outlook will influence many of our key assumptions and strategies — often with a power we hardly notice.
Our upstream metaphor is no exception: It conveys the message that it would be best for children never to find themselves caught in the child-welfare system in the first place. It suggests that the system itself can be harmful. It reminds us that children don’t just appear in the system; they are there due to certain causes. It insists that if we address those causes early on, we can prevent many children from ever entering the system. The term “upstream” expresses all of these claims without stating them directly. And they are all true.
But metaphors can also distort reality, even while revealing it. They can magnify certain truths and obscure others. Our river
metaphor might suggest that anyone with an ounce of sense would abandon downstream efforts and move upriver. Yet such a shift would merely exchange one form of myopia for another. Focusing solely on a spot just above the foster system could keep us from asking what’s further upstream. Meanwhile, our condescension toward those who continue pulling kids out of the river below may blind us to the necessity of their work and how it prevents additional tragedies downstream.
The power of the upstream metaphor, as well as the risks it carries, invites us to adopt a wider view of the child-welfare crisis — one that encompasses not just concepts of upstream and downstream, but of the whole river, indeed of the whole water cycle. We might call it a “watershed perspective.” This broader metaphor lifts our view beyond a narrow stretch of riverbank to consider all the rivulets and tributaries that flow together to form the river, all the way out to sea. This fresh outlook can help guide us toward better, more fitting solutions to the child-welfare crisis in America, offering both a fuller vision of the great challenge before us and the freedom for each of us to give ourselves fully to our own small part of the whole.
This broader metaphor lifts our view beyond a narrow stretch of riverbank to consider all the rivulets and tributaries that flow together to form the river, all the way out to sea.
Why Are Children in the River
Separating a child from his parents and placing him in foster care always represents a tragedy. Multiply that tragedy by the thousands, and you have a crisis.
As of 2022, there were approximately 369,000 minors in the American child-welfare system living apart from their birth parents. More populous states like California, Florida, and Texas accounted for the bulk of these numbers (around 45,900; 22,500; and 21,400, respectively), but states like West Virginia, Alaska, and Montana had higher per-capita ratios of foster-care placements. Of the three, West Virginia topped the list with 19.8 per 1,000 children in foster care.
As with all human dilemmas, even beginning to address the child-welfare crisis demands a clear understanding of its causes. If our diagnoses are off, our prescriptions will be as well: We may try to treat cancer with cough syrup or give chemotherapy to a person with a cold. So our analysis must necessarily begin with this question: “What is ‘upstream’ of the child-welfare crisis?”
The answer one hears most often is a single word: “poverty.” Indeed, most observers of the child-welfare system would agree that poverty plays a key role in children’s separation from their parents. But poverty doesn’t look the same for everyone, everywhere: A single mother in the Bronx working two minimumwage jobs differs from a married father in east Tennessee who can no longer find work, who in turn differs from a newly arrived family of Haitian refugees in Miami, who differ from unmarried
parents in Los Angeles struggling with domestic violence and drug abuse. We might divide these varied types of poverty into two broad categories: “material poverty” and “complex poverty.”
Material poverty revolves primarily around a single dimension: material lack. It occurs when a family doesn’t have the money and other resources necessary to get by. When people hear or use the term “poverty,” they tend to picture this type.
Complex poverty, as its name suggests, is much more complicated: It comprises a tangled knot of countless factors that touch every dimension of a person’s life. It may include familial breakdown, substance abuse and addiction, domestic violence, mental illness, poor physical health, lack of social capital and supportive relationships, and other challenges, many of them stemming from generational cycles. Material lack is part of complex poverty, but the full picture is larger, more multifaceted, and much more difficult to resolve than the material form.
Using the same word to convey two very different meanings is a recipe for confusion. This equivocation — usually unintentional — clouds a great many child-welfare debates. It misguides research, distorts policies and programs, and causes many otherwise intelligent, well-meaning people to talk completely past each other.
For example, when we say that children are being removed from their families due to poverty, some of us may be referring to cases of material poverty. In such instances, addressing the upstream problem is relatively (though not to say entirely) easy:
We just need to hike upstream and figure out a way to give these families access to the resources they lack. But if we’re facing complex poverty, the territory upstream looks more like a dense Amazonian thicket, replete with quicksand, landslides, and other entrapments that defy easy remedy. Solutions, if they can be found, will often be partial at best.
So which is the most accurate definition of poverty? In truth, it depends on the context. In some parts of the world, material poverty predominates. Families in these regions face a grinding lack of food, shelter, medicine, and other material necessities — sometimes accompanied by few or none of the deeper issues that make up complex poverty. In other regions, especially in the West, complex poverty is much more common. Here, material lack may still be a great struggle for some, but it typically comes entangled with many other, more complicated challenges.
Which of these is the primary reality for families involved with the American child-welfare system? There is plenty to debate here, but most observers would agree that there has been some shift over time. It seems that “material poverty” applied to a significant portion of families involved in the child-welfare system in prior eras, whereas the overwhelming majority of such families today face poverty of the complex sort. One recent study found that more than 98% of child-protectiveservices investigations tagged as “physical neglect” (defined as inadequate food, housing, or hygiene) also included concerns related to substance abuse, domestic violence, mental illness, or other serious risks.
To get a better sense of what complex poverty in America looks like, we might look to the example of a three-month-old boy whom I’ll call Tony, who was recently placed in foster care. Tony was born addicted to methamphetamines and other drugs he’d been exposed to in utero. His digestive tract was underdeveloped, and his brain showed internal bleeding. Doctors immediately put him on a form of opium to reduce the impact of withdrawal and alerted the child-welfare system.
Social workers knew that Tony faced serious risks, but given the shortage of available foster homes, they sent him home with his mother. They attempted to follow up with her in the ensuing weeks, but almost never found her in her small apartment. Tony’s father, a long-time boyfriend, was part of the picture, too, and also addicted to drugs. Though Tony’s mother said he lived elsewhere, his clothing and other items around the apartment suggested he was in and out frequently.
Tony was eventually separated from his parents and placed in the care of a woman I’ve known for many years. Kelli (name changed) interacts with Tony’s parents regularly, often taking the boy on unofficial visits to his mother to give the two time together. She has invited Tony’s mother and father to her church, where other parishioners have welcomed the family with open arms. Recently, Kelli invited Tony’s mother to join her at an appointment with a pediatrician. She arrived at the appointment smiling and pleasant, but clearly intoxicated.
Kelli’s faith tells her there’s hope for anyone, but hope is sometimes hard to hold onto when facing complex poverty. She’s
Hope is sometimes hard to hold onto when facing complex
poverty.
walked with many biological mothers and fathers along similar paths. Some, with much encouragement and support, have successfully reunified. Others, even those with deep affection for their children, find it impossible to escape the web of situations and habits that have long thwarted their intentions.
As for Tony’s parents, Kelli tells me that “they clearly feel a sincere love for him. But drugs and other things are more powerful in their lives right now.”
A Fuller Awareness
Recognizing the tangled nature of complex poverty expands our sense of what it means to “go upstream” in two important ways.
First, we see that upstream needs may not be as simple as we imagined. The anecdotes we’ve heard about children being removed from their homes just because their otherwise healthy parents couldn’t afford beds may be true, and those cases should arouse our indignation: Material poverty should never be the sole cause of child separation. But in the vast majority of cases, we find the needs more profound. The lack of a bed or reliable transportation may be the most visible expression of a family’s struggles, and relief of those needs may temporarily
reduce strain within the home — a worthy objective in itself. But substance abuse, domestic violence, mental illness, or some combination thereof also likely play their part, as might a dozen other intertwining forces. If we fail to take these deeper factors seriously, our attempts at solutions will prove embarrassingly inadequate. Our material-poverty solutions to complex-poverty challenges may end up doing great harm.
Second, we start to recognize that the territory upstream extends much further than our metaphor implied. Children are falling into the river due not only to material lack, or even to their parents’ addiction or mental illness: These factors, too, are results of other causes located still further upstream.
What we begin to observe is no longer just a small stretch of river, but an expansive watercourse stretching from lofty headwaters above to distant seas below. In those headwaters, we see all manner of individual and societal ills. We encounter parents who themselves were abused or severely neglected as children. We see young mothers who recently aged out of the foster-care system — or perhaps are still there. We find fatherless boys who attempt to earn manhood through sexual conquests. We see pregnant women suffering from domestic strife, whose only hope of relief comes in the form of a pill or a needle.
Eventually, we discover that these problems are also the result of other factors still further upstream. Many of these spring from the alpine cliffs of governing and commercial institutions. Some are the legacy of the deep past — historical violations of the dignity of individuals, groups, and even entire races that ripple out into the present. Others play out even as we watch. We see prisons
that incarcerate vast numbers of fathers without the intent or means to transform their hearts. We discover neighborhoods where it is easier to find a liquor store or payday lender than a job. We find public policies and programs that subtly steer behavior toward familial breakdown — including those that penalize marriage, discourage work, and legalize drugs.
Yet even at these commanding heights, we find we are still downstream. The highest upstream factors reside not on land, but in the clouds where culture is made. Here we find universities and marketing firms, churches and temples, movies and books, celebrities and social media. For both better and worse, they give us the stories, songs, images, and interpretations that form our longings and our loves. These voices tell us what is good, what is true, and what is worthy of sacrifice. A professor who convinces a student that she’ll be better off unmarried; a film that makes a teen believe his manhood will be found in how many women he beds; a song that causes a 16-year-old girl to think that a man loves her just because he wants to have sex with her; an advertisement that causes a young man to believe that drug use has no consequences — these have everything to do with the children awash in the rapids far below.
And so we see that our inclination to look upstream has gone not too far, but not far enough. All of the factors mentioned — and countless more — play decisive roles in that sad story where we began, with the little boy adrift in the river.
To complicate matters further, we realize that this child is himself upstream of further tragedies. If his course is not dramatically altered, he and other children in the rapids will likely contribute
to future heartaches — crimes and incarcerations, addictions and family disintegrations — all with great human and societal costs. Perhaps worst of all, the children he may someday create will likely find themselves awash in the rapids, just as their father was. What we’d thought of as downstream is upstream, too.
In this sense, even the most downstream-seeming phenomena have a way of wrapping around. Indeed, as our fourth-grade science teachers taught us, water at its lowest downstream point — in estuaries and oceans — will in time generate the clouds whose snows feed the mountain peaks highest upstream. Here, our metaphor expands further, to encompass the entire water cycle.
Seeing all this can feel overwhelming, even paralyzing. But a broad vision of this sort is essential to wise action. Without at least a basic sense of how these factors flow together, of how the many parts of the child-welfare cycle interact and affect one another, we will go astray again and again. Our policies and priorities will too often swing from one excess to its opposite.
A broad vision of this sort is essential to wise action.
When we have no grasp of the wider landscape, the solutions we attempt will tend to be highly myopic, focused on superficial and secondary factors. Even our upstream efforts will fail to address root causes. Conversely, as we begin to grasp the enormity and complexity of the problems, we may find ourselves tempted toward fatalism and despair, questioning whether our small contributions matter at all. Some of us, formerly full of
enthusiasm and goodwill, will burn out and quietly walk away. Others will turn their focus to macro-level advocacy that can all too easily become divorced from real people facing real struggles.
But when we hold a clear-eyed view of the full panorama before us, we begin to notice how it all flows together. Our original upstream metaphor — modeled on a simplistic notion of cause and effect — expands to include headwaters and oceans, mountains and clouds. We perceive cycles and patterns. We notice how pieces are interconnected. We observe critical junctures and tributaries along the long and winding waterway. This “watershed” mindset guides us to four important shifts in outlook, each offering a principle for wise action.
