Child Welfare for the Twenty-first Century

A Handbook of Practices, Policies, and Programs

Gerald P. Mallon, Peg McCartt Hess, Gerald Mallon, Peg McCartt Hess

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9780231511162
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

This up-to-date and comprehensive resource by leaders in child welfare is the first book to reflect the impact of the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) of 1997. The text serves as a single-source reference for a wide array of professionals who work in children, youth, and family services in the United States-policymakers, social workers, psychologists, educators, attorneys, guardians ad litem, and family court judges& mdash;and as a text for students of child welfare practice and policy.

Features include:

* Organized around ASFA's guiding principles of well-being, safety, and permanency

* Focus on evidence-based "best practices"

* Case examples integrated throughout

* First book to include data from the first round of National Child and Family Service Reviews

Topics discussed include the latest on prevention of child abuse and neglect and child protective services; risk and resilience in child development; engaging families; connecting families with public and community resources; health and mental health care needs of children and adolescents; domestic violence; substance abuse in the family; family preservation services; family support services and the integration of family-centered practices in child welfare; gay and lesbian adolescents and their families; children with disabilities; and runaway and homeless youth. The contributors also explore issues pertaining to foster care and adoption, including a focus on permanency planning for children and youth and the need to provide services that are individualized and culturally and spiritually responsive to clients. A review of salient systemic issues in the field of children, youth, and family services completes this collection.

S E C T I O N I I I

Permanency for Children and Youth

Overview

With the passage of the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act over two decades ago and the more recent enactment of the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997, permanency planning has served as the broad practice and legal umbrella for the provision of the continuum of child welfare services. Building on the knowledge derived from a number of demonstration and research projects (see Gambrill & Stein 1994; Pecora, Whitaker, Maluccio, Barth, & Plotnick 2000), permanency planning involves a mix of family-centered, child-focused, and culturally relevant philosophies, management and program components, and practice strategies designed to help children and youth live in families that offer a continuity of relationships with nurturing parents or caregivers and the opportunity to establish lifetime relationships (Maluccio & Fein 1993).

Because it is widely acknowledged that separation, loss, and unresolved grief—as well as the uncertain and often long-term nature of the foster care experience—can have a negative impact on children’s overall sense of belonging, identity formation, and emotional well-being, the process and outcomes of permanency planning are intended to safely limit entry into placement, and failing that, to limit the time children and youth spend in care. Thus, planning for children’s permanency as well as their safety and developmental well-being should begin when a family first comes in contact with the child welfare agency. From this initial contact, permanency efforts are supported by actively including families and children/youth in individualized case planning; by insuring that workers visit both the child and parents frequently; and by coordinating service delivery and competent decisionmaking, including legal entities, about where children and youth will grow up. Permanency planning requires that case-by-case assessments (which integrate a safety or risk assessment) and interventions balance the time needed for a family to make necessary changes with a young person’s need for continuity of relationships and secure attachments and his or her ability to tolerate separation and loss.

As explored in depth in this section of the text, permanency planning involves a mix of family-centered casework and legal strategies designed to insure that children and youth have safe, caring, stable, and lifetime families in which to grow up. According to the National Resource Center for Foster Care and Permanency Planning at the Hunter College School of Social Work (1999), these strategies include:

• Targeted and appropriate efforts to protect safety, achieve permanence, and strengthen family and child well-being;

• Early intervention and prevention, with reasonable efforts to prevent unnecessary out-of-home care when safety can be assured;

• Safety as a paramount concern throughout the life of the case, with the identification of those aggravated circumstances in which reasonable efforts to preserve or reunify families may not be required;

• Appropriate least restrictive out-of-home placements within family, culture, and community, with comprehensive family and child assessments, written case plans, goal-oriented practice, and concurrent permanency plans required;

• Reasonable efforts to reunify families and maintain family connections and continuity in children’s relationships when safety can be assured;

• Reasonable efforts to find alternative permanency options through adoption, legal guardianship, or in special circumstances, another planned alternative permanent living arrangement outside the child welfare system when children cannot return to their parents;

• Filing of termination of parental rights petitions 15 months after placement when this action is in best interests of the child and exceptions do not apply;

• Collaborative case activity—establishing partnerships among birth parents, foster parents, agency staff, court and legal staff, and community service providers;

• Frequent, high-quality parent-child visits, as well as worker-child and worker-parent visits; and

• Timely case reviews, permanency hearings, and decisionmaking about where children will grow up, taking into account the child’s sense of time.

In the Child and Family Services Review process, the permanency variables have been conceptualized in two broad areas:

—Outcome Permanency 1: Children have permanency and stability in their living situations through:

• Decreasing foster care re-entries;

• Achieving the stability of foster care placement;

• Establishing a permanency goal for the child;

• Accomplishing reunification, guardianship, or permanent placement with relatives;

• Adoption; or

• Permanency goal of other planned permanent living arrangements.

—Outcome Permanency 2: The continuity of family relationships and connections is preserved for children through:

• Proximity of the child’s foster care placement to the parents’ home;

• Placement with siblings also in care;

• Visits with parents and siblings in foster care;

• Preservation of connections;

• Placement with a relative; and

• Maintaining a relationship between the child in care and his/her parents.

An array of permanency outcomes (each discussed in this section) is desirable for children and youth, with priority given to those that maintain the child’s existing family and kin relationships and connections. Therefore, achieving permanency calls for initially attempting to keep children and youth at home safely with their parents to prevent the trauma of unnecessary separation and placement or, failing that, placing children with relatives when possible and with other siblings entering care. These issues are fully explored in Hegar and Scannapieco’s chapter on preservation of the extended family–kinship care and in Hegar’s chapter exploring the importance of maintaining sibling connections.

For children and youth who cannot safely remain with their families and for whom placement in family foster care is therefore necessary, numerous issues must be considered. These are discussed in Barbell and Freundlich’s overview of family foster care and in Bullard and Johnson’s examination of group care settings. For the majority of children and youth, family reunification (see the chapter by Pine, Spath, and Gosteli), is the preferred permanency option. Cordero and Epstein explore a technique for refining the practice of reunification in their chapter, which discusses a project involving “mining” successful foster care records of substance-abusing families. Parent-child visiting, at the heart of reunification, is explored by co-editor Hess in her chapter.

When children and youth cannot return home within the federally mandated timeframe of 12 to 15 months, alternative permanency options should be pursued, including adoption by relatives, foster parents, or a new family (Groza, Houlihan, and Wood explore these issues in their chapter); customary adoption in Indian communities (see the chapter by Cross and Fox); legal guardianship with relatives, foster parents, or another caring adult (see the chapter by Testa and Miller); and in special circumstances, another planned alternative living arrangement with relatives, foster parents (considered by Renne and co-editor Mallon in their chapter), or a small community-based group or residential setting—each with attention to lifetime family connections that can be nurtured and preserved.

Increasingly, child welfare practitioners understand that their work, even when reunification is not possible, must also involve birth families (see Hollingsworth’s chapter on birth-mothers whose parental rights are terminated and Cooper Heitzman’s chapter focusing on a birth mother–child reunion story). Practitioners must also consider the effects of permanency efforts that may not be positive (see Festinger’s chapter on adoption disruption). In their chapter, Wright and Freundlich review the salient issues concerning post-permanency services that support families in achieving continued permanence and stability.

Permanency planning balances the rights and needs of children, youth, and parents with the harm that can be brought by the passage of time and delays in decisionmaking. Although there is no one correct outcome for achieving permanency for all children and youth, the challenge is to arrive in a timely manner at the permanency outcome that offers the greatest measure of emotional and legal permanency for each child or youth. The unique circumstances for youth in foster care are considered in a chapter focusing on youth development and independent living services by Nixon.

Fulfilling the promise of permanency requires that children, youth, and family service practitioners are aware of the need to include the following elements in their practice:

• Family-centered and strengths/needs-based practice;

• Community-based service delivery;

• Cultural competence and respect for diversity;

• Open and inclusive practice;

• Nonadversarial approaches to problem solving and service delivery; and

• Concurrent rather than sequential consideration of all permanency options.

The chapters in this section of the text address a broad range of issues. Furthermore, since they are written by academics, practitioners, and others with a wide range of experiences in the field, the reader will also find diverse opinions and perspectives concerning permanency planning and, in some cases, about child welfare in general.

REFERENCES

Adoption and Safe Families Act. (1997). P.L. 105-89.

Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act. (1980). P.L. 96-272.

Gambrill, E., & Stein, T. (1994). Controversial issues in child welfare. Englewood, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Maluccio, A. N., & Fein, E. (1993). Permanency planning: A redefinition. Child Welfare, 62, 195–201.

National Resource Center for Foster Care and Permanency Planning. (1999). Handouts on concurrent permanency planning. New York: National Resource Center for Foster Care and Permanency Planning, Hunter College School of Social Work.

Pecora, P., Whitaker, J. K., Maluccio, A. N., Barth, R. P., & Plotnick, R. D. (2000). The child welfare challenge: Policy, practice, and research, second ed. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter.

B A R B A R A A. P I N E
R O B I N S P A T H
S T E P H A N I E G O S T E L I

Defining and Achieving Family Reunification

In this chapter, we focus on an important aspect of child welfare practice—family reunification. The chapter begins with national statistics on the number of children in foster care in the United States, and presents a brief overview of the policy context of family reunification. The discussion outlines a broader definition of positive outcomes in family reunification and provides information on the risk and protective factors of families working toward reunification. Promising research-based practice approaches, the skills and values needed for effective practice in family reunification, and ethical aspects of practice are discussed. Case examples are provided throughout to illustrate practice principles for working with children in out-of-home care and their families.

Children in Out-of-Home Care

In response to child maltreatment, state child protective service agencies often remove children from their homes and place them in foster care. In 2001, approximately 903,000 children were victims of abuse and neglect in the United States (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 2003b), and 542,000 children were in the foster care system because of maltreatment (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 2003a).

Demographic Characteristics

What were the characteristics of these children who were separated from their birth families? Girls were almost as likely as boys to be in out-of-home care: 48% of children in care are girls. In terms of age, there is a nearly equal division of younger and older children. Those between the ages of 1 and 10 make up 46% of the foster care population, whereas children aged 11 to 17 represent 40%. The largest group, representing 29% of children in care, are between the ages of 11 and 15. Thirteen percent of children are less than 1 year old; fewer than 1% are 19 or older, reflecting most state policies of aging children out of care at age 18. The race of three-quarters of children in care is also nearly equally divided between black non-Hispanic (38%) and white non-Hispanic (37%). The remaining quarter of the children are Hispanic (17%), American Indian, Asian, Alaska Native, or their race/ethnicity is unknown (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 2003a). As these figures clearly show, children of color are greatly overrepresented in the population of children who are separated from their families and placed in foster care.

Placement Settings and Service Goals

Almost half of the children in care (48%) were placed in nonrelative foster family homes, and almost one-quarter (24%) were in kinship care placements. Ten percent of children were placed in an institution, and 8% were in a group home. The remaining 10% had run away, were in preadoptive homes or supervised independent living, or had been returned to their homes for a trial visit (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 2003a). According to these government statistics, reunification is the case goal for almost half of the children in care (44%); during the 2001 fiscal year, 57% of children who exited foster care were reunified with their parent(s) or primary caretaker(s). This outcome—going back home to children’s birth families—has typically been viewed as the goal of foster care practice. More recently, however, as discussed below, this limited view of positive outcomes for children has been challenged and new objectives have emerged in both policy and practice.

Defining Family Reunification

The Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act (P.L. 96-272), passed in 1980 amid growing concern about the length of time children spent in foster care, emphasized placement prevention and family reunification. When children could not return to their family of origin, new permanent families, chiefly through adoption, were to be found. The law also demanded greater accountability from state child welfare agencies in achieving policy goals (Pine 1986). As a result of this landmark legislation in permanency planning, agencies placed renewed emphasis on reunification. Outcomes were view dichotomously—either children were returned home or they were not. This view did not seem to fit with the needs of many families who were receiving child welfare services, however, and some observers (Maluccio, Warsh, & Pine 1993:5–6) began to question its usefulness:

It is time to challenge this all-or-nothing premise as too simplistic, and to view family reunification as a flexible, dyn...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Historical Evolution of Child Welfare Services
• Section I. Child and Adolescent Well-Being
• Section II. Child and Adolescent Safety
• Section III. Permanency for Children and Youth
• Section IV. Systemic Issues in Child Welfare
• About the Editors
• List of Contributors
• Index