The kids 'downstream'
‘Take Me Home’ is a little-known book with very big implications for America’s broken foster care system
By Daniel Heimpel 09/25/2008
Last month, Oxford University Press released a book that takes a clear look at america’s foster care crisis. In “Take Me Home,” Jill Duerr Berrick, a faculty member at UC Berkeley’s School of Social Welfare, assesses the shortcomings of child welfare and systematically sets an agenda for bettering the lives of the half-million children who live as wards of the state.
Duerr Berrick makes clear that those who want to change foster care policy face the pervasive impression that the system is a failure, which can cloud the judgment of the policy makers and administrators who steer it. “Right now so many people are so disillusioned that actually the way the field is moving is to keep kids out of the front door,” she says during an interview.
She explains that much of current policy has been based on prevention, the moving of funds and effort to catch “kids upstream,” before the turbulence and pitfalls of abuse occur.
To accomplish this, Child Protective Services has put a large emphasis on family preservation and maltreatment prevention. But through a close examination of studies nationwide, Duerr Berrick concludes that while prevention is well-intended, it is often ineffective and a diversion from the essence of foster care.
“The fundamental mission of child welfare is downstream,” she writes. “Where children must be served, where the child welfare system accepts its greatest responsibility, and where the public is holding it accountable.”
Prioritizing child welfare back to its core role of caring for children who have already been abused and neglected, Duerr Berrick gives examples of how to serve those children better, ultimately getting them into a safe and loving home.
In her focus, Duerr Berrick takes a novel approach. Much of child welfare literature is child-centric, missing the parents’ role in a child’s development. Duerr Berrick spent two years meeting with six families in the Bay Area who had a wide range of experiences with child welfare authorities — mothers who had their children taken and never returned and others whose children returned broken by the system.
By focusing on parents’ experiences, Duerr Berrick paints a stark picture of the system’s shortcomings and develops a unique perspective to address them. One is the lack of adequate interaction between social workers and their clients; another, the high burden put on foster families who care for nearly half of all the children in the system.
Poor social worker oversight can be deadly, as Berrick explains through the story of Rachel. “I know what they mean when they say one is too many and a thousand never enough,” Berrick writes of Rachel’s admissions of drug abuse.
Rachel’s sons, Steven and Michael, entered foster care and — despite what appeared to be a good placement — things quickly unraveled. The boys said that foster parents Lynette and Ray Dunn hit them. Despite Rachel’s numerous attempts to get her social worker to react, it took eight months to have the boys removed. And that was at the Dunns’ request, not Rachel’s — the social worker had simply ignored the mother.
As Duerr Berrick writes: “A year later, well after Steven and Michael were reunited with their mother, Rachel was watching the evening news when she learned that Lynette and Ray killed a foster kid in their care. In spite of her efforts to save her own sons, someone else’s child was not as lucky.”
Duerr Berrick attributes social worker failings to a system pushed to the edge. Social workers have far too many in their caseloads and constantly work in crisis mode. “This creates a culture of demoralization,” she says. “Where workers don’t feel like they have capacity and resources to do anything about it. So they get stuck.”
But it’s not only the social workers who are undersupported and overworked. Because most children in the system live with foster families, Duerr Berrick sees this as an area where improvement can be most effective.
By diverting resources from prevention, attention could be shifted to help strained foster parents. “Mandated public services such as foster care should not have to depend on the goodwill of saints,” she writes. With more money and — more importantly — targeted support services, these foster parents would not have to be miracle workers. Instead, they could be normal people with good hearts who are adequately assisted in the difficult task of raising children who have endured abuse and neglect.
Duerr Berrick has an interesting idea for who would fill a helping role. Citing the Super Nanny Jo Frost as an example, she calls for a cadre of workers to engage in intensive in-home care and counseling for foster families trying to raise difficult children. She imagines that half of her students at Berkeley would happily accept such a position. Even if the establishment of a core of such Super Nannies may be some time off, it is vital to address the needs of young people in the system — and its failures.
“The vast majority of kids in foster care are there because they really needed to be protected. And now that they are there, they are our responsibility. They are our kids,” Duerr Berrick says emphatically. In “Take Me Home,” she pushes forward an agenda that can help an ailing system live up to that responsibility.
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