These Are The Basics of Child Welfare

Critical Issues in Child Welfare

Joan Foster Shireman

second edition

Introduction: Social Work and Child Welfare

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hild welfare is a specialized field of practice within which the values and skills of social work are implemented. Historically, the fields of child welfare and social work have been intertwined—sometimes almost the same field, as at the time of the founding of the juvenile courts and the Children’s Bureau, but at other times distinct. In 2003, when the first edition of this book was published, it was one of those times when child welfare was distinct from social work. Child welfare was working under a narrow definition as a specialized field with a focus on the protection of children.

Social work was just beginning its movement away from emphasis on therapeutic interventions and mental health. However, in the past ten years, child welfare has begun to shift its focus to a broad concept of the welfare of children and families. And social work seems to be resuming its historical thrust toward social justice.

The definition of child welfare is important.

Some basic principles will make clear the point of view from which this book is written. t There is no dichotomy between the welfare of the child and the welfare of the family.

Every child grows best in his or her own family if the family can provide proper care. Any policy that supports family life supports the welfare of children. Child welfare is, therefore, about the welfare of children and families. t Many children are growing up in severely stressed families. For some children (approximately nine out of every

thousand), concerns about safety within the family are established (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 2013). Work with these children and their families requires a special set of skills that are unique to the practice of child welfare.

Protective service requires the ability to assess family strengths and risks to the child. It requires the skills to help families use their strengths to care adequately for their children. Out-of-home placement requires the ability to assess the needs of the child and the strengths of various placement options, matching the two. It also requires knowledge of the meaning of separation to the child and the ability to work with children to minimize trauma. t The development of children who enter the child welfare system often has been severely distorted by their prior experiences and, if they are placed in out-of-home care, by the trauma of separation from their families.

Brain-imaging technology is revealing the neurologic damage to children resulting from these experiences. Multiple community resources will be involved in providing for these children and youth. Parents, foster parents, and residential care providers have daunting challenges. Consistency and stability of care are critical. t Skills needed to work with these children and their families, to stabilize out-of-home placements, and to preserve children’s connections to family are of a high order and demand a professional educational background, as well as training in specific 1

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skills. The congruence between child welfare and social work knowledge and value bases, as well as a long history, has made social work education a preferred background for child welfare practitioners.

The definition of child welfare used in this book thus encompasses the set of communitysupported programs that enhance the welfare of children—a broad definition, but one that must be constantly in the minds of those who are advocates for children. The goals of child welfare—safety, a permanent family, and wellbeing for every child—are the goals of all of these programs. This book describes those programs that directly enhance the ability of families to care for their children—preventing, remedying, or ameliorating maltreatment—and are within the realm of social work services.

For practical reasons only, educational, recreational, and medical services receive little attention in this book, though all of these are part of a comprehensive system of services to children and families.

As an overview of the field of child welfare, this book is written to help those working with children and families, or preparing for this work, to attain an acquaintance with child welfare policy and with the research and practice issues that inform it. The student will find a focus on the role that social work can and should play in child welfare services. It is a policy book, not a book about practice. But the two cannot really be separated, for policy shapes practice, and practice shapes policy. And both should be informed by theory, empirical work, and practice wisdom.

Child welfare services are firmly embedded in their communities. This book begins with a look at the community context of child welfare, noting changes over time, and the role of social work in the development of services to children and families. In chapter 1, the focus is on the problems that children and families face. Next, in chapter 2, the framework for child welfare services is outlined, including the goals and

key outcomes expected. The remaining chapters provide an overview of the core services of child welfare.

The book encompasses a vast array of information and necessarily includes only superficial description of some important elements of the system. However, at the end of each chapter, the reader will find a section in which a critical issue is identified and explored in some depth.

Poverty seems to be the critical issue of all child welfare, the condition that shapes the lives of far too many children and families, thus it is the first of the issues to be discussed in depth at the end of chapter 1. The critical issues of chapters 2, 3, and 5—building of lifelong family connections as an outcome of services, the disproportionate representation of children of color in the child welfare system, and the developing empirical base for child welfare services—are fundamental concerns throughout child welfare services. The critical issue of chapter 4 is early care and education, increasingly important as we learn more about the lifelong impact of early child development. Beyond these fundamental issues, the critical issues discussed in the other chapters are more specific, but central to the topic of each chapter: establishing and retaining foster homes, long-term outcomes of out-of-home care, adoption outcomes and post-adoption services, and the transition from child welfare services to adult living. The final critical issue discussed in depth is the retention of workers, vital to the delivery of services.

These issues were chosen because they are of central importance to child welfare today and are currently the focus of research and development of policy and services. The selection of these issues will, however, be controversial; the reader might well have selected others.

The Crisis in Child Welfare Those child welfare services that enhance the growth and development of children in their own families tend to be valued by the community. These are services designed to support family life, such as early child care and

INTRODUCTION: SOCIAL WORK AND CHILD WELFARE

education, respite care, parenting classes, and counseling programs that help troubled parent-child relationships. These are services into which most families enter voluntarily. Many are underfunded. Some have had their efficacy demonstrated; the effectiveness of others has yet to be ascertained. The array of available services continually changes as families, communities, and legislatures experiment with what can be funded, what can be sustained, and what is useful. There is great variability in the availability of these services, particularly between urban and rural areas. These services face important challenges: how to expand successful, small demonstrations to serve larger populations; how to target services accurately so as to prevent later, larger problems; and how to secure and maintain funding.

Whereas such family-based and communitysupported programs are challenged, public child welfare services are experiencing a crisis.

The crisis is most acute in protective services and in foster care, although other parts of the child welfare system have their controversies and uncertainties. The reasons for the crisis in child welfare are not complex. Higher community standards for the care of children coupled with deterioration of family stability and community cohesiveness has created an overwhelming number of referrals of children thought to be in need of protection—in 2012 an estimated 3.4 million referrals (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 2013). A legacy of forty years of unwillingness to fund children’s services, or any social services, at a generous level has left public child welfare agencies with staffs that, in general, are not professionally educated and are managed by an intricate network of policy directives. The complex decisions that must be made in working with families and children under stress can overwhelm untrained workers, so that resignations and new hiring compound the problems of the child welfare agencies.

Overwhelmed by the numbers of children and families needing help, public child welfare in the last quarter of the twentieth century narrowed

its mission and focused on the protection of children, abandoning the range of services that meet the varied needs of children in many circumstances. Other community agencies, however, did not replace services once publicly funded. Only in the past ten years has public child welfare begun to expand this focus and invest in a broader range of services to families.

What happens next is not clear. As the focus of service widens to include the range of services families need, the numbers of families needing help with complex problems and the numbers and skills of child welfare workers remain unbalanced. The current expansion of the focus of services has expanded the role of the protective service worker. Positive though this broadening is for families and children, whether it can be sustained is uncertain. It is an exciting time to be involved in child welfare.

Despite a developing interest in services to preserve the families of children and prevent outof-home placement, foster care has remained a staple of child welfare services. At the same time, demographic changes in family structure, particularly the entry of women into employment out of the home, have resulted in fewer foster homes.

There may not be enough homes to match children’s needs and foster families’ strengths. Child welfare workers have neither the time nor skills to provide supportive help to foster families in their care of children. Too often, when problems arise, children are removed from one foster home and placed in another. The problems of the children’s families of origin are complex, and change is often slow and erratic, so it takes time to move children out of foster care and back into their own homes. Long stays, with multiple moves, are damaging to children and intensify the shortage of foster homes.

Reform ideas for the foster care system have focused on reducing the number of children who need foster care, so that there would be enough foster homes. Family preservation programs and kinship foster care are the chief strategies. Other initiatives would increase the supply of foster homes through legislative limits

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on the time a child can remain in foster care and through development of resources to retain foster parents in the system.

What do children from troubled families need? Primarily, they need safety, permanent, nurturing families, and continued concern for their well-being across the domains of their lives. These are the desired outcomes for child welfare services. There are a thousand different ways to achieve these goals for children; indeed, each child’s unique situation calls for a unique approach. Investing in professionally trained child welfare workers, and then freeing them to use their skills while supporting them in their efforts, is one route to meeting the many individual needs of the children who come to the attention of the child welfare system. Though child welfare is an arena where many disciplines have important contributions to make, social work—with its focus on communities, family systems, and development throughout the life span and with its tradition of advocacy for the vulnerable—has particular value.

Child Welfare and Social Work: A Historical Connection Child welfare has historically been a part of the social work profession. The early leaders in social work were deeply concerned about children and tireless in their advocacy for child labor laws, universal education, income maintenance, and other reforms that have benefited children. The interaction of social work and child welfare is documented in Women and Children First: The Contribution of the Children’s Bureau to Social Work Education (Lieberman and Nelson 2013). Imbued with a value system that emphasizes advocacy for the powerless in our society, social workers have long espoused the interests of children and their families.

The advocacy of social workers, over time, is reflected in the following quotations.

Nor, unfortunately, does there seem to be any reason for thinking that charities for caring for destitute, neglected, and delinquent children will

soon become unnecessary. We learn to deal more and more wisely with those who are in distress, but the forces which produce poverty, neglect, and crime seem to be beyond our reach. The poor, the neglectful, and the vicious we shall have with us for a long time to come, and the hearts of the generous will continue to respond, both through individual and associate charity, and through governmental action. (Folks 1902:246) We must also recognize that the co-morbidity of poverty, substance abuse, domestic violence, mental health issues, problems of maternal and child health, developmental disabilities, and child placement has been established beyond a reasonable doubt, and that service systems must address these multiple problems in a coordinated way if they are to meet the needs of clients. (Meezan 1999:17) In 2012 the United States finds itself in conditions similar to those of a century earlier, with a slow, recovery from the Great Recession, a shift from an industrial to an information/service economy, a crumbling infrastructure, large numbers of immigrants, huge wealth and income disparities, inferior public education, and 15% of the population with 22% of the children living in poverty in 2010 [Addy and Wright, as cited in Ellert]. Sadly, it seems, history has a way of repeating itself. Without a vision for the future and a reallocation of resources, maltreated children and their families will predictably experience poorer physical and mental health, remain undereducated, lack for skills, and remain dependent on an increasingly politicized society.

(Ellert 2013: ch. 11)

Social Work Social work has had a complex history. The early social welfare workers focused their efforts on reform of a society to give the poor and vulnerable greater opportunity. Specht and Courtney in their provocative book outline a history of a shift in social work from community concerns and advocacy for community change to a fascination with psychotherapy and change within the individual.

INTRODUCTION: SOCIAL WORK AND CHILD WELFARE

It appears that throughout this century social work has been evolving toward a manifest destiny. Starting as the Cinderella of professions, left for years by psychiatry and psychoanalysis to do society’s dirty work of tending to the poor and destitute, social work has finally been transformed into a princess. Sparklingly attired by her fairy godfather, Carl Rogers, she is off to dance at the psychotherapeutic ball with all of the other fifty-minute-hour professionals. Neither war, nor depressions, nor massive social upheavals have stayed her from her course. (Specht and Courtney 1997:163–64)

A profession is based on underlying constructs that “provide direction for the knowledge base, give a specific value orientation, and suggest research programs” (Kreuger 1997:22).

Grounding in theory the dichotomy identified

by Specht and Courtney, Kreuger identifies the “grand narratives” of social work as the theories of Karl Marx, which identified the victimization of the economically disadvantaged, and the theories of Sigmund Freud, which laid the groundwork for interventions that might enhance an individual’s ability to cope with the world. Kreuger suggests that although these “grand narratives” have been discredited, they still form the base of social work. It is immediately apparent that the two “grand narratives” point in different directions, one leading toward interventions to change society, the other toward interventions to assist the individual in getting along in the existing society. In child welfare, both are at work, in the simultaneous efforts to build a stronger community to support families and to enable families to cope with current circumstances.

The social work profession has its roots in the struggle to change the community, the first “grand narrative” that Kreuger identifies, so that individuals will have more social and economic opportunity. The settlement houses, which provided education for immigrants and were a center of endless reform efforts; the social survey movement, which documented

the plight of the economically disadvantaged; the early work of the Children’s Bureau for the health and economic security of women and children—all were focused on changing conditions for the vulnerable. This advocacy and reform impetus laid a strong value base for the profession. The second “grand narrative” identified by Kreuger has provided a different set of values that undergird direct practice. One is the belief that change is possible and that the individual is capable of lifelong growth. Another is the respect for the uniqueness of the individual and the individual’s capacity to make judgments and guide his or her own life. Values of freedom and the right to privacy are buried in these constructs.

Clearly, there are values that tie these positions together or the profession would have splintered. One is the idea that everyone should have access to opportunity and the ability to take advantage of that opportunity: one marker of successful social work intervention is the maximizing of individual choices. Another is the idea that individuals are capable of making changes, in themselves or in their communities.

A third is the enhancing of individual responsibility to the community.

Specht and Courtney suggest that the true mission of social work is that of building communities and working with individuals to accept responsibility as community members. Along with many in the profession, they advocate for a return to this focus. Meezan, in his address on the future of children’s services quoted earlier, makes the same point, noting also that community building is far easier to espouse than to accomplish. Ortega and Reed (2013) outline the complexities of community building across cultures. These ideas point toward the new direction in social work—or perhaps it is a return to an older mission.

Child Welfare Child welfare also has a complex history. Its focus has shifted as communities identify new problems, but the struggle to find ways

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to enrich the lives of vulnerable children has always remained paramount. Beginning as a “child saving” movement, early child welfare practitioners (whether town selectmen or the leaders of movements such as Charles Loring Brace’s shipments of children to the farming families of the West) intended to educate children in the ways of religion and productive work, thus saving them from idleness and ruin.

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the rise of a child rescue movement, as private child protective societies were formed to protect children from parental cruelty—an extension of the societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals. From these societies came the idea that children had rights and fuller discussion of the rights of parents and the rights of children. In the early 1900s, ideas of “scientific charity” and “social work” were introduced, bringing to the child rescue movement the idea that support of the child’s own home might be a possibility and that, if a child was removed, reunification of the family should be a goal.

Through all of these child welfare “movements,” the focus was on the individual child and family. At the same time, during the Progressive era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, early social work introduced the idea in child welfare practice of changing the community conditions in which children grew. This era, in which social workers were prominent, brought an expansion of the protections to children, such as the child labor movement and the establishment of the juvenile courts, and also an increased focus on programs that would benefit families, such as maternal and child health, and on income maintenance. This dual emphasis on child protection and family enhancement endures today.

Policy and Practice in Social Work and Child Welfare The Progressive era was probably the time when the early social workers and the early child welfare workers were most closely aligned.

Although part of the social work profession

later wandered off into therapeutic halls and child welfare was partly de-professionalized, they have remained linked. The basic skills of work with individuals and families, as explained in social casework texts, are grounded in the practical realities of everyday life. These fundamental skills have been very useful, helping individuals and families learn to solve problems, use strengths, and maximize the opportunities available to them in their communities.

As social workers moved into positions in child welfare, they brought with them their skill in working with individual families, increasing the possibility of rebuilding families rather than removing children from them. However, neither social work nor child welfare has emphasized the dimension of enabling individuals to contribute to their communities.

The strongest links between social work and child welfare are the shared value system and a shared set of skills. Social workers struggle with the investigatory nature of protective work and with the concomitant intervention in family life. But when these functions are successfully brought together by a skilled social worker, using the basic principles of social work practice, the resulting opening of opportunities and choices for families and children can be impressive.

A Note About Case Examples Throughout the book, case examples are used to illustrate various facets of child welfare practice. These examples are almost all drawn from research completed at the Graduate School of Social Work at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, under the auspices of the Child Welfare Partnership and the Regional Research Institute for Human Services. Child welfare practice with involuntary clients was examined in this research through interviews with families, caseworkers, foster parents, and community partners. Case examples use the words of the participants, drawn from transcripts of interviews, to illustrate concepts developed in the text.

INTRODUCTION: SOCIAL WORK AND CHILD WELFARE

Briefly, the project monitored the implementation of a statewide practice reform in Oregon’s State Office for Services to Children and Families. The practice model focuses on (1) initial building of a relationship between caseworker and family through developing agreement about the needs of the children, (2) a planning process that builds on family strengths and the family’s perspective in identifying needs and planning services, (3) services identified or crafted to meet specific needs, and (4) flexible funding to

ensure that services can be found or created as necessary to meet identified needs. The issues in the implementation of this model, particularly in protective services, are many and fascinating.

For those who may want to explore the model and its implementation in greater depth, the research is reported in a series of reports, which are listed in the references (Shireman et al. 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001). The final report (Shireman et al. 2001) summarizes the project and is available at www.rri.pdx.edu/Project/744.

REFERENCES

Human Services, Graduate School of Social Work, Portland State University.

Shireman, J., D. Yatchmenoff, B. Wilson, L. Gordon, B. Sussex, C. Poirier, C. Workman, W. Howard, and J. Alworth. 1999. Strengths/Needs Based Services Evaluation: Biennial Report. Portland: Regional Research Institute for Human Services, Graduate School of Social Work, Portland State University.

Shireman, J., S. Eggman, J. Alworth, B. Wilson, L. Gordon, C. Poirier, C. Workman, and W. Howard. 2000.

Strengths/Needs Based Services Evaluation: Interim Report. Portland: Regional Research Institute for Human Services, Graduate School of Social Work, Portland State University.

Shireman, J., A. Rogers, J. Alworth, B. Wilson, L. Gordon, C. Poirier, C. Workman, and W. Howard. 2001.

Strengths/Needs Based Services Evaluation: Final Report. Portland: Regional Research Institute for Human Services, Graduate School of Social Work, Portland State University.

Specht, H., and M. Courtney. 1997. Unfaithful Angels: How Social Work Has Abandoned Its Mission. New York: Free Press.

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Administration on Children, Youth, and Families, Children’s Bureau. 2013. Child Maltreatment 2012. Available at www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/research-data -technology/statistics-research/child-maltreatment.

Ellert, A. 2013. “Developing a Better Future for Children and Families in the United States.” In A. Lieberman and K. Nelson, eds., Women and Children First: The Contribution of the Children’s Bureau to Social Work Education, 199–220. Alexandria, VA: Council on Social Work Education Press: Folks, H. 1902. The Care of Destitute, Neglected, and Delinquent Children. New York: Macmillan.

Kreuger, L. W. 1997. “The End of Social Work.” Journal of Social Work Education 33.1:19–28.

Lieberman, A., and K. Nelson, eds. 2013. Women and Children First: The Contribution of the Children’s Bureau to Social Work Education. Alexandria, VA: Council on Social Work Education Press.

Meezan, W. 1999. Translating Rhetoric to Reality: The Future of Family and Children’s Services. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Ortega, D., and C. Reed. 2013. “Creating a House of Cards: The Struggle to Create Community Partnerships Across Difference in a Child Welfare Context.”

In A. Lieberman and K. Nelson, eds., Women and Children First: The Contribution of the Children’s Bureau to Social Work Education, 221–230. Alexandria, VA: Council on Social Work Education Press.

Shireman, J., D. Yatchmenoff, B. Wilson, B. Sussex, L. Gordon, C. Poirier, W. Howard, and J. Alworth. 1998.

Strengths/Needs Based Services Evaluation: Interim Report. Portland: Regional Research Institute for

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