The Child Welfare Challenge

Policy, Practice, and Research

Peter J. Pecora, James K. Whittaker, Richard P. Barth, Sharon Borja, William Vesneski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780815351658
• eBook ISBN: 9781351141147
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Using both historical and contemporary contexts, The Child Welfare Challenge examines major policy practice and research issues as they jointly shape child welfare practice and its future. This text focuses on families and children whose primary recourse to services has been through publicly funded child welfare agencies, and considers historical areas of service—foster care and adoptions, in-home family-centered services, child-protective services, and residential treatment services—where social work has an important role.

This fourth edition features new content on child maltreatment and prevention that is informed by key conceptual frameworks informed by brain science, public health, and other research. This edition uses cross-sector data and more sophisticated predictive and other analytical processes to enhance planning and practice design. The authors have streamlined content on child protective services (CPS) to allow for new chapters on juvenile justice/cross-over youth, and international innovations, as well as more content on biology and brain science. The fourth edition includes a glossary of terms as well as instructor and student resource papers available online.

1 Purpose, Goals, Objectives, and Key Policies of Child and Family Social Services, With a Special Focus on Child Welfare

Learning Objectives

1. Understand the purpose, goals, and policy objectives of child and family services.
2. Explore child welfare policy and related legislation through the years.
3. Learn about child welfare policy change strategies.
4. Review policy and program design challenges.

Purpose, Goals, and Policy Objectives of Child and Family Services

Purpose of Child Welfare Services

Child welfare services (CW) provides a variety of child and family social services, including child protective services, in-home services, relative and non-relative family foster care, and various forms of group care – as well as family reunification, adoption, and guardianship as forms of permanency planning. CW services include an array of decision-making and family service programs of last response when more preventive and universal services fail. When educational programs are unable to engage children and families and high truancy rates persist, when public housing and job creation are not sufficient to make safe housing affordable, when children with challenging behavior can no longer live safely with their families, and when maternal and child health does not ensure that mothers are ready and able to parent when they are called on to do so, CW services become engaged. At the time of writing, more and more families are struggling just to get by. We have growing evidence that financial stressors, among many, are a significant determinant of child maltreatment and CW services involvement (Slack, Berger, & Noyes, 2017). The brief list of issues below identifies critical problems facing low- and moderate-income families that must be addressed if CW is to achieve its goals:

• Child poverty remains unacceptably high and stagnant. The child poverty rate has been stagnant since it began to rise in the early 2000s. Despite some indications of economic growth, child poverty has not returned to the levels seen in the late 1990s. As of 2015, 21 percent – over one in five children – live in a family that is officially considered poor (U.S. Census Bureau, 2015).
• Full-time work is not always enough to provide for a family. Research consistently shows that a full-time job at low wages is not enough to exceed the poverty-level level.
• Many families do not have access to critical supports and services, such as childcare, paid sick leave, and mental health services. Many families lack access to affordable, high-quality childcare, and do not have any paid sick leave to care for themselves or for a sick family member, or personal leave to attend events related to special needs of their children. Using 2012 data, a special U.S. Department of Labor (2014, p. 143) study found that fewer than 10 percent of individuals in the lowest 25 percent of earners have access to paid family leave. (See the ALICE [Asset Limited, Income Constrained and Employed] reports done by United Way in 2017, available at www.unitedwayalice.org/reports.php.).
• A sizable number of children still lack health insurance. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) has increased substantially the number of children and families covered by health insurance, in part, by extending Medicaid coverage to many low-income individuals in states that have expanded, and providing marketplace subsidies for individuals below 400 percent of poverty. The ACA’s major coverage provisions went into effect in January 2014 and have led to significant coverage gains, but this law is being undermined by recent federal legislation. Yet, as of 2015, 3,886,000 children (5.2%) remain uninsured,. Comprehensive health and behavioral health insurance coverage is critical to improving children’s access to care as well as to ensuring good health (U.S. Census Bureau, 2016).
• Too few young children have access to quality early experiences. Low-income 3- and 4-year-olds are less likely to have access to preschool programs than their more well-off peers, even though there is growing recognition that the impact of the first five years lasts a lifetime. Programs like Early Head Start and Head Start can prepare young children for a productive life, but they are not able to serve every eligible infant and toddler (adapted and updated from the National Center for Children in Poverty, available at http://nccp.org/rel_18.html).

During FFY 2016, CW agencies received an estimated 4.1 million referrals involving approximately 7.4 million children, with 676,000 confirmed victims (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services [U.S. DHHS], 2018). More than one-third of all children will be investigated as victims of child maltreatment during their lifetime (Kim et al., 2016). Notwithstanding these large numbers, there is some evidence that both reporting and incidence rates of child maltreatment have decreased significantly over the past 15 years – but with significant variation among states and counties (Finkelhor & Jones, 2006; Sedlak et al., 2010; U.S. DHHS, 2018).

Overall, the number of children in foster care placement rose steadily between 1980 and 2000. However, as a result of changes in CW policies and programs, the number of children in out-of-home care has slowly decreased since 2000 with a slight increase from 2014 to 2016 (U.S. DHHS, 2016a, 2016b; 2017b, 2017c) which appeared to continue through 2017. In the United States as of September 30, 2016, 437,465 children were in out-of-home protective placements in foster care and non-family settings, and 687,000 children were served by CW agencies (U.S. DHHS, 2017b, 2017c).

Child maltreatment is clearly a major social and health challenge, and a variety of programs have been developed for prevention as well as child treatment and placement. In this field, public policy makers, practitioners, and scholars are working to devise new ways to address child maltreatment and its root causes. Indeed, new resources and ideas are reshaping CW practices across the country. Notably, agencies in Florida, Illinois, New York City, and in other communities are making successful efforts to reduce child length of stay in out-of-home care, reduce the level of restrictiveness of child placements, and increase the proportion of children placed with kin who are not blood relatives. In addition, the number of children being adopted or securing a permanent placement through guardianship has increased over the past 20 years (U.S. DHHS, 2014).

These innovations may expand further with new initiatives designed to reduce the time that children spend in foster care and increase permanency. These initiatives include CW demonstration waivers (www.acf.hhs.gov/cb/programs/child-welfare-waivers), “permanency roundtables” (Rogg, Davis, & O’Brien, 2011), expedited adoptive parent assessments, expedited approvals of subsidy applications, family group conferencing (Connolly & McKenzie, 1999), judicial reforms (American Bar Association, 2017), and heightened attention by the agencies and courts to the need for more timely permanency planning. Although CW agencies are burdened with yet another significant drug epidemic that is impairing child safety, professionals, families, and advocates across the country are experimenting with new policies and procedures designed to find safe and enduring living arrangements for children.

In this chapter, we review the mission and goals of CW services. Next the major social policies that are directed toward these families will be described. Drawing from innovative projects and programs across the country, we will present some policy change strategies and conclude with an overview of major policy challenges in CW.

Mission and Goals of Child Welfare Services

The mission of CW has long been to respond specifically to the needs of children reported to public child protection agencies as abused or neglected, or at risk of child maltreatment. In this century, there has been more emphasis on looking beyond public and private CW agencies to involve communities as a whole in the protection and nurturing of children, and to formulate collaborative community efforts to prevent and respond to child abuse and neglect. Our knowledge of the interplay of risk and protective factors at the child, parent, family, neighborhood, and community levels has grown to underscore the need to look beyond the parent–child dyad. Although all children have highly individual needs and characteristics, they live in the context of their families; families live in the context of their cultures and communities; and communities in the context of their social, economic, cultural, and political environments (Child Welfare League of America, 2004).

When CW services incorporate and draw upon the richness and strength embodied in this context of family life, they can more effectively respond to the needs of vulnerable children and troubled families. While agency mission statements provide the overall context for service, it is essential that key goals or outcomes are specified to help guide such functions as establishing agency strategic plans, policy formulation, funding decisions, and worker practice within a context of philosophical values and scientific practice (Testa & Poertner, 2010; Wulczyn et al., 2005). System goals and expected outcomes are discussed in the next section.

Early childhood development, neuroscience, and epigenetic research underscore the importance of communities paying careful attention to nurturing children via supporting the adults who raise them (Biglan et al., 2012). Recently, a somewhat broader framework for CW has emerged, and, in the interest of protecting and nurturing children, greater emphasis is being placed on communities as a whole. Consistent with this expanded frame of reference, CW agencies have increased their efforts to engage employers as well as mental health, primary education, healthcare, and higher education institutions to form collaborative community strategies aimed at preventing and responding to child abuse and neglect: “There is no ‘children’s well-being’ system in the United States to which child welfare workers can refer children in need. Instead, we have a siloed set of service systems that may or may not be child-focused” (Berrick, 2018, p. 28).

Child Welfare Service Outcomes

In spite of foundational disagreements on the definition of maltreatment, the field of CW services is gaining clarity and consensus about its primary mission. A primary goal and two secondary goals for CW services have emerged with widespread support. First and foremost, the primary goal is safety – to protect children from harm. The second goal, which is focused on child permanency, is to preserve existing family units, including birth, relative, and adoptive families, as appropriate. The third goal is to promote children’s development as adults who can live independently and contribute to their communities. This final goal may enlist a variety of permanency planning alternatives such as family reunification, placement with relatives, different forms of guardianship, adoption, and intentionally planned kinship care with legal safeguards such as guardianship (U.S. DHHS, 2014).

Currently, a challenging and controversial issue facing CW is the disproportionate number of children of color in foster care placements. Of the 117,794 U.S. children awaiting adoption in 2015, nearly 23 percent (26,709) were Black and 22 percent (25,822) were Hispanic (U.S. DHHS, 2017b). In fact, about 54 percent of the foster care population are children of color (i.e., African American/Black, Latino/Hispanic, Asian, Native American/ Indigenous, and two or more races), and some of these children will remain in foster care placements until they are emancipated at age 18 (U.S. DHHS, 2014, 2017b). Furthermore, African American children represented 23 percent of the children placed in out-of-home care nationwide in 2016 (U.S. DHHS, 2017b), which is significantly higher than the percentage of African American children in the general population for 2015 (14%) (Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2017). It is well documented that the placement of N...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Purpose, Goals, Objectives, and Key Policies of Child and Family Social Services, With a Special Focus on Child Welfare
• 2 Child Maltreatment: Nature, Prevalence, and the Implications for Social Policy
• 3. Protecting Children from Child Abuse and Neglect by Strengthening Families and Communities
• 4. Strengthening Families through Anti-poverty Efforts
• 5. Family Foster Care and Kinship Care
• 6. Achieving Permanency through Family Reunification, Adoption, and Guardianship
• 7. Juvenile Justice and Crossover Youth in Child Welfare
• 8. Specialized Treatment Services for Children and Families
• 9. Leadership, Staffing, and Other Organizational Requisites for Effective Child and Family Services
• 10. International Innovations in Child and Family Services
• Index