Child Welfare

Preparing Social Workers for Practice in the Field

Kathryn Krase, Tobi Delong-Hamilton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781315436999
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicina
• Subtopic: Salud general

Child Welfare: Preparing Social Workers for Practice in the Field is a comprehensive text for child welfare courses taught from a social work perspective. This textbook provides a single source for all material necessary for a contextual child welfare course.

As well as combining history, theory, and practice, the authors integrate different practice perspectives to teach social workers how to engage children and families at the micro, mezzo, and macro levels. Covering both broad issues, such as child welfare, child maltreatment, and responses to child maltreatment, and current issues in social care, including mandated reporting and evidence-based policy prevention and preservation, the material is designed to meet the needs of social work students entering the child welfare workforce.

Child Welfare provides students in social work courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels with a single source for all material necessary to successfully navigate their studies and careers.

Part I

A Social Work Introduction to Child Welfare

1What Is Child Welfare?

Chapter Summary

In order to understand the policies and systems designed to protect children from harm, we need to understand the basic concepts that frame “Child Welfare”. Who is a child? What do children need? What is “welfare”? Who is responsible for preserving child welfare? These may seem like straightforward questions, with simple answers, but this chapter will, hopefully, make clear that there are no simple answers, because these questions are more complex than first imagined.

Defining Child Welfare

In the field of social work, when someone mentions “child welfare” they are usually referring to a large system made up of governmental and private entities who have a level of responsibility for protecting children from harm at the hands of their families or caretakers. The term “child welfare system” generally includes child protective services, governmental and privately operated systems that coordinate out-of-home placement of children, and other related services provided by the government or non-governmental agencies. The child welfare system is designed to protect children from certain types of harm. To better understand how this system works, it is important to understand the underlying concepts that define it.

Who Is a Child?

The question, Who is a child? has a simple answer in the United States: anyone under 18 years of age. Children are not allowed to make many decisions for themselves. For instance, parents, not children, get to decide what school children go to, what medicine children take when sick, how much screen time children can have on a daily basis, and what YouTube channels children can access. From a legal perspective, children cannot make most decisions about their own care and well-being. For instance, a child, generally, needs a parent or other legal guardian to provide authorization for most medical procedures or permission to even go on a school trip.

In all states, when a competent person attains their 18th birthday, they gain certain legal rights that allow them to make a plethora of decisions for themselves. Turning 18 is often referred to as “reaching majority”. This is why individuals under 18 years old are often referred to as “minors”. At 18 years of age, an individual can enter into a legal contract. At 18, an individual can get married in any state without parental permission. At 18, an individual can enlist in the armed forces without parental permission. While many young adults may still reside with their parents, having reached adulthood, their parents are no longer responsible for providing or caring for them.

There are, however, many people who are 18 years of age, or older, who continue to have limited rights. When someone with a physical, mental, or cognitive impairment is determined by a court to be unable to make competent decisions to preserve their own well-being, another adult, or the government, will be assigned as “guardian” and held responsible for making such decisions. In many states, the same systems put in place to protect “child welfare” will serve to protect the welfare of incompetent/incapacitated adults.

Additionally, individuals who were in out-of-home placement prior to turning 18 are often allowed to remain in the child welfare system after they attain majority. These individuals have all the legal rights of adults, but the government retains some responsibility for caring for them until they reach a certain age (depending on the state), or they transition out of the child welfare system.

The larger question here is, Why does society define the term “child”? The answer to that question is more complex. The next chapter presents an historical analysis of child welfare that gets into detail about changing societal understanding of who a child is. At the most basic level, though, we define the term child so that we, as a society, can respond differently to the rights and responsibilities related to the group. While 18 as the age of majority is roughly related to developmental expectations for maturity and the ability to care for oneself, in reality 18 is an arbitrary number. Some individuals may be mature enough to take care of themselves at 16 or 17, while others may not be similarly responsible until deep into their 20s, if ever. However, it would be a governmental nightmare to determine who is a child and who is an adult on an individual basis. (You think the line at the Department of Motor Vehicles is bad ….)

For the purposes of the present discussion on the child welfare system and throughout this text, we use the general American standard to define childhood: a child is under 18 years of age unless the individual is deemed incompetent/incapacitated by the government or the individual remains under the authority of the child welfare system due to their status in out-of-home placement beyond their 18th birthday.

What Is “Welfare”

When most people hear the term “welfare” they think of governmental services provided to poor people. However, the term “welfare” is much simpler than that. “Welfare” means “the state of doing well”. Therefore, “child welfare” simply refers to efforts to preserve or improve the health or condition of children.

In order to determine the welfare of a child, society has expectations for what children need. The concept of “well-being” takes into account many facets of a child’s condition in an effort to determine if their needs are being met. At the most basic level, to ensure survival a child needs food, shelter, and clothing. In twenty-first-century America, however, no one thinks that basic levels are enough. Children are expected to have access to the medical system to ensure their health. Children are expected to have access to the educational system to ensure they learn the skills necessary to become independent adults. Children are also expected to be protected from harm, more so than adults are protected.

But are food, shelter, clothing, medical care, education, and safety enough? What else do we think children need? Do children need to be clean? Do children need to be physically active? Do children need adequate rest? Do children need to be happy? Does society have any structures in place that are designed to meet children’s other needs? Should society develop new structures to meet other needs?

What Is Sufficient?

It is not revolutionary to say that children need basic standards of food, shelter, and clothing to support their welfare. But what are the standards? Is it enough that children are given the opportunity to eat food sufficient to meet their dietary requirements for growth, a place to sleep out of nature’s elements, or clothing appropriate for the weather? Or should children be guaranteed the healthiest foods? Should children have their own bed to sleep in? Are hand-me-downs or less-than-fashionable clothes sufficient?

When considering and applying standards in child welfare, it is important to note that there are different standards for what is acceptable. Families of different socioeconomic levels or from different cultures may have different expectations for what is enough. When a social worker is in the process of evaluating whether a child is receiving adequate resources to support their welfare, it is important to be aware of any personal experiences or expectations that may impact such an assessment and, instead, use objective criteria that eliminate the impact of bias.

Who Is Responsible for Child Welfare?

Now that we have a basic understanding of who children are and what they need to support their welfare, the next question is the whole reason for this book: Whose responsibility is it to ensure that children’s welfare is protected?

This used to be an easy question. Until the late nineteenth century the answer was simply: the parents. As you will see in the next chapter, those expectations have changed a lot since 1875. The answer in the present time is different. A combination of parents, other family members, the government, and even, sometimes, children are responsible for ensuring that children’s welfare is protected.

Role of Children

It may seem unfair to expect children to be responsible for their own welfare. But, when you really think about it, much of childhood is spent teaching children how to be responsible for their own welfare so that they are ready when adulthood arrives.

Expectations that children preserve their own welfare vary by age or developmental stage. No one expects a toddler to make responsible food choices or know when it is time to take a nap. However, there is a point at which children can toilet themselves or adequately brush their own teeth (without supervision).

Due to evolving expectations regarding children’s responsibility for their own welfare, the standards expected of their caretakers differ depending on the child’s age and developmental stage. For instance, when a 7-year-old is not attending school regularly, the parents may likely be found responsible for educational neglect. However, when a 15-year-old is not attending school regularly, the child welfare system is more likely to consider the teenager’s role in failing to meet the educational standard. It is important to note that, even when a child is determined to have contributed to a condition contrary to promotion of their own welfare, their parents will ultimately be held responsible for ensuring improvement.

Role of Parents

Why do we hold parents responsible for their own children? In some cultures, children born into a community are the responsibility of all. However, in America, the expectation is that children will be cared for by their parents first. If parents fail in their responsibility, then we have mechanisms in place to fill the parental role.

Parents in the United States of America have many rights when it comes to the care of their children. Many of these rights are codified through important United States Supreme Court decisions.

Parents have the right to, largely, determine their child’s education. In the 1923 case of Meyer v. Nebraska (262 U.S. 390), an instructor at a parochial school was tried and convicted of a crime for teaching children in a foreign language (German). Nebraska had a criminal statute, the Siman Act, that outlawed the teaching in foreign languages to children until ninth grade in any school in the state. The law was a xenophobic response to World War I and growing immigration from Germany and Italy, much like the “English-Only” laws that were passed in Iowa and Ohio around the same time. The teacher, Robert Meyer, appealed his conviction all the way to the United States Supreme Court. In a blistering opinion, the Court struck down the Siman Act, and other acts, by a 7–2 vote. The Meyer decision was the first in a series of important Supreme Court decisions that found rights in the US Constitution that were not explicitly written in the document. In the Meyer decision, the Court determined, for the first time, that individuals have “certain fundamental rights which must be respected”, including “the right to marry, establish a home, and bring up children”. Included in the right to bring up children, the Court found “the power of parents to control the education of their own” children.

In 1925, just two years after the Meyer decision, the US Supreme Court came down with another important case related to parents’ right to determine the education of their children: Pierce v. Society of the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary (268 U.S. 510). Similar to Nebraska, Oregon passed laws aimed at limiting the influence of immigrants. The goal was to use public education as the means to promote a common American culture through the Compulsory Education Act. The primary purpose of the Act was to require children between the ages of eight and 16 years old to attend school. However, Oregon took the law one step further, requiring students to attend public school, with limited exceptions. Private and parochial schools challenged the law as an overextension of State power. The US Supreme Court unanimously agreed with the private and parochial schools, striking down the Oregon law as unconstitutional. Clarifying that a child is not “the mere creature of the state”, the Court found that “those who nurture [the child] and direct [the child’s] destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare [the child] for additional obligations.”

Nearly 50 years after Meyer v. Nebraska, the Supreme Court returned to the issue of parental control over education and religion in the 1972 case Wisconsin v. Yoder (406 U.S. 205). The compulsory education law of Wisconsin required parents to have their children educated until they turned 16. Amish and Mennonite parents argued that their children should not be required to stay in school past the eighth grade since such preparation was not necessary to live an adult life based on their religious beliefs. The US Supreme Court sided with the parents, finding that the Wisconsin’s “interest in universal education” needs to be balanced against the “fundamental rights” of parents, including the “interest of parents with respect to the religious upbringing of their children”. Essentially, the Court said that the government’s concerns for educating all children in the state do not outweigh the parents’ right to choose to educate their children in accordance with their religious practices.

The US Supreme Court has very rarely taken up cases related to child maltreatment, foster care, or adoption since they are issues generally under the jurisdiction of states, not the federal government. However, in the 1982 case of Santosky v. Kramer (466 U.S. 745), the Court stepped in to set a national standard for the burden of proof required for the gov...