Critical Issues in Child Welfare

Joan Shireman

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780231539272
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Children's Studies in Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Reorganized for more effective classroom use, the second edition of Critical Issues in Child Welfare begins with an updated, thorough overview of the challenges currently facing at-risk children and families. A description of the child welfare system highlights issues that are discussed in more detail throughout the book. The text explores protective services, family preservation, foster care and residential care, adoption, services for adolescents, and training and retention of staff. New material highlights the recent discoveries of the impact of early trauma and stress on children's development, and the modifications currently taking place in the child welfare system in response to this new information. The book also examines the critical challenges of poverty and substance abuse, the importance of the community in shaping child welfare services, racial disproportionality in the system, the changing response of the system to LGBT issues, and services to ameliorate the difficulties of youth leaving the system.

1

The Context of Child Welfare Services

Do Lawd, come down here and walk amongst yo people

And tak ‘em by the hand and telt ‘em

That yo ain’t hex wid ‘em

And do Lawd come yoself,

Don’t send yo son,

Cause dis ain’t no place for chillen.

—Prayer composed by slaves, 1866

Today there is increasing recognition that the solutions to social problems lie within their broad societal context. Thus, the task of promoting the welfare of the child demands a focus broader than the child or even the child and family. The community provides the cultural and value framework within which families function and may or may not provide sufficient supports to enable the family to function adequately. Socioeconomic, cultural, and political forces combine to provide a complex and ever-changing mix of demand, opportunity, barriers, and resources. Policy affecting the lives of children and families is formed as a result of this dynamic interaction.

The scope of the child welfare services available to children is dependent on the community’s definition of the needs of children. The manner in which the community identifies these needs will depend to a very large degree on how the forces of the larger world shape the community, as well as upon the culture and resources of the particular community. The family difficulties that are recognized as social problems change over time. This chapter traces some of those changes and outlines the context within which child welfare services work.

The community sets the standards of care that it expects for its children, and the community sanctions and funds the child welfare workers who try to ensure that children have that care. But the social worker does not only carry out the wishes of the community. The social worker who in the course of daily work discovers conditions that harm children has a responsibility to advocate for change. The worker must know the community intimately, for more and more, child welfare workers are called on to find and use community resources for the families they serve and to help develop community resources that those families need. Thus, an important backdrop for a study of current child welfare policy is an overview of how community forces shape the lives of families and of how changing community definitions of social problems affect the commitment of resources.

In looking back at the history of children in the United States, the reader will discover the role of social work in alerting the public to the needs of children and mobilizing public opinion to intervene and make life better for children. This introductory chapter discusses problems that have been solved through the advocacy of those working with families and problems that continue to call for remedial attention: poverty (and the related history of child labor), education that is often inadequate, the changing family, substance abuse, violence, and the maltreatment of children. Racism underlies and compounds all of these issues. The role assigned to mothers as caretakers of children demands constant examination, as does the absence of fathers. In later chapters, we will examine the major ways in which social work and the allied professions have intervened in attempts to solve these social problems—never fully reaching goals, but succeeding in producing meaningful changes.

Changing Community Expectations

Community standards and customs change over time. Progress in bettering the lives of all children is evident if one begins a review of changing community standards with a look back to the condition of children in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As the nineteenth century became the twentieth, child labor laws and compulsory education laws were passed. The first half of the twentieth century saw enormous strides in the guarantee of a basic income for families, so children could be cared for at home—and then the end of the century saw the erosion of this promise. The second half of that century saw increasing concern with child maltreatment, as physical abuse, sexual abuse, and family violence were successively identified as major threats to children. As this problem became evident, the focus of child welfare narrowed to child protection—only in very recent years has this focus expanded.

The initial response to the discovery of child maltreatment was to rescue the children from the offending families, ensuring safety. Safety thus became and has remained a primary goal of child welfare services. As workers gained experience with each of the above types of maltreatment, they learned that it was often possible to keep children safe within their own homes, and they learned that out-of-home care too often led to multiple separations and serious developmental problems. A second goal developed: ensuring that every child had a permanent home—the original home or an adoptive home. And in recent years, as ongoing research has illuminated the needs of children in out-of-home care and the difficulties of families in the community, the goal of tending to the overall well-being of each child has developed. This is currently expressed in attempting to keep children with their families, either parents or extended families, and providing family support services. Responsibility for meeting the developmental needs of each child under care in the child welfare system, including the provision of mental health, medical, and educational services to children, is necessary to ensure well-being.

The programs and services integral to child welfare have shifted over time. The reformers of the Progressive era (late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) argued for a greater federal and state government role in the resolution of social problems. These years saw an increasing development of government programs and movement toward federal provision of resources and standard setting. Such programs continued to expand through the years of the New Deal (the 1930s) and the War on Poverty (the 1960s), then began to contract and grow ever more constricted in the last three decades of the century.

Many social problems remain: too many children are poor; too many children do not have health care; too many children lack affordable, high-quality day care; too many children with special needs lack the services that would help. Families who are at risk need preventive services, and families in which children have been abused or neglected need a wider range of better-funded and more imaginative remedial services. But progress has been made, and social workers have often led the way.

The following sections review a few of the major social problems that affect our communities today, particularly those in which social workers, or their predecessor social welfare workers, have displayed a particular interest. We begin with the history of change regarding two social problems—child labor and juvenile delinquency—to illustrate the impact that a determined group of child advocates, in this case social welfare workers, can have. It is an optimistic start to a look at a multitude of serious problems that today demand action.

A Legacy of Advocacy and Change: Social Work at the Start of the Twentieth Century

From colonial times, it has been considered important that children learn the habits of work as preparation for adult life. Education was also valued as a necessity for governance in a democratic society. The difficulties of children in a justice system designed for adults were also recognized. These stories serve as examples of the investment of early social workers in the welfare of children.

Child Labor Closely linked to poverty, child labor was recognized in the late nineteenth century as a social problem, and the early social workers were instrumental in changing the conditions faced by children in the factories.

During the nineteenth century, there was a growing recognition that factory employment kept children from becoming educated and that a democracy would be ill served by a population that could not read or write. Poor families depended on the wages of all family members. Manufacturers were eager to employ children because they could be hired for low wages and because their dexterity was an advantage. Thus, women and children formed a large proportion of the industrial workforce. Testimony before the Pennsylvania Senate in the 1830s described the conditions of employment:

The hours vary in different establishments; in some I have worked fourteen and a half hours…. It is most common to work as long as they can see; in the winter they work until eight o’clock, receiving an hour and a half for meals…. The children are employed at spinning or carding…. I have known children of nine years of age to be employed at spinning—at carding, as young as ten years. Punishment, by whipping, is frequent; they are sometimes sent home and docked for not attending punctually…. The children are tired when they leave the factory. I have known them to sleep in corners and other places, before leaving the factory, from fatigue. The younger children are generally very much fatigued…. The wages of children are not regulated by the number of hours they labor; I have known some to get no more than fifty cents per week; I have known some to get as much as $1.25. (Journal of the Senate of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, session of 1837–38, testimony of William Shaw, as reported in Abbott 1938a:280–81)

Social reformers—among them Jane Addams, Florence Kelley, Grace and Edith Abbott, Sophonisba Breckinridge—were active in support of the child labor and compulsory education laws. Labor unions also supported these laws because the employment of children at low wages undercut their demands for better wages and working conditions. Of course, there was great opposition to these laws, from employers and, sadly, from poor parents who “thought the sacrifice of their children necessary” and saw themselves as in great need of, and having a right to, their children’s earnings (Abbott 1938a:263).

Early child labor laws passed by states protected only children in factories; those protecting children in less regulated industries, such as street peddlers, or children working in home industries followed more slowly. (The protection of children who work in the fields, particularly the children of migrant workers, has still not been accomplished.) The first child labor law in 1916 was followed by a series of attempts to enact federal legislation to protect children. All were declared unconstitutional, deemed to overreach the regulatory powers granted to the federal government in the Constitution. An attempt to pass a constitutional amendment in the 1920s was unsuccessful. During this time, many states passed laws regulating child labor, but not until 1938 with the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act did federal legislation succeed in restricting child labor (Costin, Bell, and Downs 1991).

Compulsory Public Education Compulsory public education and child labor laws were linked; it was thought that children needed education and feared that children not in factories might be “idle” if not required to go to school. The first compulsory education law in Illinois (1889)

made unlawful for any person, firm, or corporation to employ or hire any child under thirteen years of age without a certificate, but the board of education was given authority to excuse any such child from school and to authorize his employment, provided his labor was needed for the support of any aged or infirm relative and provided the child had attended school at least eight weeks in the current year. The system of allowing children to work if their relatives seemed to be in need meant, of course, that the children most in need of the protection of child labor and compulsory education laws would be entirely excluded from their benefits. (Abbott and Breckinridge 1917:69)

As further compulsory education laws were passed, the shortage of schools and teachers became evident. A report to the Chicago school board in 1896 complained that

until there are schools for the children, and a compulsory education law that is enforced, the factory inspectors cannot keep all the children under fourteen years out of factories and workshops…. In Chicago, the City Council has taken a distinctly retrograde step in reducing the school appropriations by $2,000,000 for 1896–97, thus checking the building of school houses, and depriving thousands of working-class children of the opportunity for school life which primary schools are supposed to extend to all alike. (Report of Florence Kelley to the Chicago School Board, 1896, as reported in Abbott and Breckinridge 1917:81–82)

The development of a school system that could accommodate and educate the many children now free to attend school was a massive undertaking, one that is still in progress.

By the end of the 1930s, then, there were laws protecting children from being exploited in difficult working conditions and laws giving children the opportunity to be educated in public schools. Community support for these laws was widespread. The concept that the child needed to be trained to be a useful citizen had not been abandoned, but industrialization had given a different focus to that training; school became the route to productive citizenship.

Although child labor and education laws greatly changed the condition of children, the problems they addressed are not completely in the past. There is continuing concern about children who work and whose schooling is disrupted; this is particularly of concern with migrant families who follow crops to work in the fields. There is also widespread concern about young people who do not complete the schooling necessary for productive adult lives. In 2008, 81 percent of white students and 91 percent of Asian students received a high school diploma or equivalency certificate, as did only 64.2 percent of Native American students, 63.5 percent of Hispanic students, and only 61.5 percent of African American students (Children’s Defense Fund 2011). This disparity is linked to poverty and to racism. Because schools are locally funded, schools in poor communities have few resources; many African American and Hispanic children live in the poorest of our communities. Child advocates still have work to do to secure equal opportunity through universal education.

The Juvenile Court During the same era that laws were being passed regarding child labor and universal education, reform of the way the justice system handled children took place. For the greater...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Acronyms
• Introduction: Social Work and Child Welfare
• 1. The Context of Child Welfare Services
• 2. The Child Welfare Services System
• 3. Child Protective Services
• 4. Family Support and Child Well-Being
• 5. Crisis Intervention: Preservation of Families for Children
• 6. Investment in Foster Care
• 7. Out-of-Home Care for Children with Special Needs
• 8. Adoption
• 9. Youth in Transition
• 10. Concluding Thoughts
• Appendix: Internet Resources
• About the Contributors
• Index
• Series List