Last summer, a distraught 12-year-old just returning to foster care after a month on the run looked me straight in the eyes as I was utterly failing to explain why child protective services (CPS) had not yet secured a new placement for her. I have been voluntarily helping to support her for the past five years as a Court-Appointed Special Advocate.
And with some more colorful language mixed in, she said to me: Just stop with the words, and fix it.
I say the same to the two camps in child welfare presently entrenched in a battle where each side is seemingly vying to maximize child death and suffering in defense of their side of the argument. Just stop with the words, and let’s fix it. Divided you have little chance of effecting change in Washington; together, anything and everything is possible.
One side argues that despite millions of CPS investigations and hundreds of thousands of family separations every year, we should involve more families in the system to ensure not one child dies who we could have removed from a dangerous home. The other side argues we should abolish the system altogether, alleging racist roots and a poor track record of keeping children alive, let alone thriving once removed from their parents.
We are wasting time, and lives, by arguing over which side has the higher butcher’s bill. The butcher’s bill is too high, period. Too many children are killed by the hand of a parent and too many children are killed or otherwise destroyed by a system intended to protect them. Now is the time to split the check right down the middle and get to work fixing the multiple systems that must do better or be rebuilt to support children and their families.
As a former U.S. Senate senior policy advisor and director with a track record of working across the aisle and getting results, I have listened as the rhetoric among these opposing views in child welfare has grown louder. From years on Capitol Hill, I tell you that asking policymakers and their staff to pick between two divergent views is a losing strategy.
Why would policymakers spend political capital wading into a fight among advocates when picking sides will only result in bad press and no-thank-yous? The most anyone should expect during advocate fights such as this are milquetoast policy changes which do absolutely nothing to positively affect the course for children and their families.
As adults, we have the ability to carry multiple truths simultaneously. The current child welfare system as we know it sweeps in too many families who could be better served by other resources to nurture, support and build families up. Involving too many families in an adversarial child protection system has caused countless pains to children and their families as families have been needlessly broken apart.
The current child welfare system has also failed to rightly protect children at imminent risk of harm as well as failed to treat, let alone stop, harm to children once removed from their home. We have too often compounded the pain of children who have already suffered abuse.
Holding these truths concomitantly, now is the time for all of us to act and do differently, together. Staying in our comfort zone, focusing myopically on the child welfare system as we believe it should be or ending it entirely, is not fixing the problems children and their families face.
On the front end, to be successful, families need access to secure housing and child care, just as a place to start. And for families struggling with addiction or mental illness, they need access to services that start with the premise of trying to keep a family together safely as the parent is treated.
For the children who have been abused or for whom it is not safe to remain with their families, we must improve our behavioral and mental health systems to ensure timely, accessible, consistent, evidence-based treatments for the abuse they have endured as well as greatly improve the homes and residential treatment centers we entrust with these children in the name of safety and security.
Traversing other systems such as Medicaid, behavioral and mental health, child care, housing, workforce training, and juvenile justice is neither an easy nor comfortable task. But better connecting child welfare to these systems as well as making needed changes to them is the only path forward to fixing the complex, multilayered problems of the two truths we hold — that we are breaking apart too many families needlessly and furthering the pain of abused children either by failing to treat or by exacerbating the abuse once in care.
