CFK Reports From: Child Welfare and Well-Being: Building a 21st-Century System for Kids
Event: Panel discussion
Organized By: The Urban Institute and Chapin Hall Center for Children
Where/When: June 8, 2006; Urban Institute, Washington, DC

Report by: Susan Phillips

This event, the last in a series, was a useful discussion of one of the central tensions within the child welfare field: between the imperative to keep children physically safe from harm and the understanding that removing children from their parents, homes and neighborhoods damages them. Working with finite resources, child welfare agencies often struggle to move beyond keeping children safe (and their agency out of the headlines that result from a failure to do so) to actively promoting children's well-being by making sure they have stability, and that they receive the counseling and other support services they need.

Linda Gibbs, New York City's deputy mayor for health and human services, noted that for child welfare agencies around the nation, "Safety is the core issue. And it is the only thing you are resourced to do well." However, Gibbs said, when agency leaders have a clearly articulated vision of how to enhance the well-being of children in the child-welfare system, they can sometimes build effective partnerships with other agencies or groups for which well-being is a core issue.

But Gibbs warned that it isn't easy, because it means working with groups that are often harsh critics of child welfare agencies. "It's hard to invite your critics to the table," said Gibbs.

Brenda Jones Harden, an associate professor at the Institute for Child Study, University of Maryland, College Park, said that in her early years as a child welfare caseworker, she found herself well-prepared to do many of the things the job entailed, but "really poorly trained to understand children." She stressed the need to incorporate knowledge of child development into caseworker training. According to Harden, the lack of such knowledge leads caseworkers to make uninformed decisions about connecting kids to services. "They use a lot of mental health services, a lot of medical services, but not a lot of developmental services," said Harden. "Often they don't have a clue what these services really mean in terms of outcomes."

Fred Wulczyn, a research fellow at Chapin Hall, said efforts to incorporate child well-being into the practices of child welfare agencies are hampered by a lack of consensus on what constitutes child well-being and how best to promote it.

However, Olivia Golden, an Urban Institute senior fellow, said certain things are known and can be incorporated into agency practice. "If the agency is preventing children from going to school, that is a bad thing," said Golden. "We know shelters and short-term placements are not good for children." Golden added, "Not doing damage is a legitimate goal."

Wulczyn, however, said that advocates of better child welfare systems should be careful about embracing child well-being as a goal. "Well-being is a code word," said Wulczyn. "It allows people to leave it vague. It lacks clarity, and makes it difficult to drive a policy agenda."
Wulczyn also noted that when a state takes a child into foster care, that is "a coercive use of state power in the lives of families." As a result, it cannot be done lightly, which is one reason the system is so focused on safety. He warned that moving towards a situation where the state becomes deeply involved in deciding if parents are doing a good or bad job raising their children has its own dangers.

The panel was moderated by journalist Judy Woodruff.

An audio file is available on the Urban Institute web site [1].