A lot of us are giving thought to the next child welfare leader for the Trump administration. I’d like to imagine that it will be someone who can rise above the partisanship that has divided our profession for the past several years. We want someone who can advance a unified agenda, respects our history — someone who can appreciate the value of a scalpel and avoid the temptation to apply a sledgehammer to the many outdated policies and practices.
A leader who can think across disciplines and systems, is a consensus-builder, preferably an innovator who balances research and community narratives, and someone who has direct service experience. Personally, I’m less interested in their ability to navigate and inhabit social media and more welcoming of a leader who speaks with an unequivocal voice promoting the value and the importance of our profession. And it would be essential that they listen to and incorporate the narratives of our many diverse communities.The safety and stability of families depends on a variety of social supports, and those supports are vulnerable to drastic spending reductions under the incoming administration, so we require someone who is vigilant, visible and strategic.
Here’s hoping that the child welfare leader and their team will have the open-mindedness to hear, interpret and act on a broad range of views.
I’m not that naive to think that my perspective on this is more than just that: one person’s voice. But even with our differences, we can create for the new leadership team a compelling, nonpartisan narrative that highlights the nuances and wickedly gray areas of our work, while still messaging child safety and family preservation.
There is good news that the country has seen a relatively safe reduction in the number of children in foster care and that the legislative and policy tone set during the first Trump administration, and continued into the Biden administration, has helped several states to reorient their efforts toward family support and prevention. We can highlight that more jurisdictions are formalizing their efforts to use kinship care as a first option, with the corresponding level of help from the government.
We have stories of how more agencies are rediscovering the power of community connections as a critical component of child safety, bringing together nonprofits, schools, medical professionals, congregations of faith and people with lived experiences who provide parents with alternative pathways for assistance, reducing the likelihood of government intervention. I’m thinking about models such as the Bester Community of Hope in Hagerstown, Maryland, that started with an investment from several philanthropic funders and recently received a multiyear, multimillion-dollar set of grants from the state government to advance its family/community strengthening approach. This is just one example, but there are countless others that are promising and effective.
We can report on how we have advanced the competence of our workforce with research on parental substance use disorders, brain science and the impact of early childhood trauma.
Let’s also tell another side of our story, how we’ve struggled to improve our records on child safety, child fatalities and near fatalities. How we question our calls on family interventions and removals of children from their homes. How kids wind up spending the evening in offices and hotels because we don’t have the right mix of resources to address the spectrum of their behaviors and their families’ problems. How we have far too many youths leaving foster care to become permanent clients of the state, unhoused or unattached. How our workforce numbers are debilitated, and their skill level is not nearly what it should be.
If this new administration is serious about families, they will realize that the road toward improvement is not going to be a straight line.
We’ve long since outrun our ability to create a narrative of how to get child welfare “right” with one-dimensional solutions or theories about child safety or family support and preservation. Though countless acts of practical compassion and competence happen every day in child welfare agencies around the country, we are still falling short of excellence.
Our practice model is obsolete. We’ve made too many compromises on quality, especially related to child safety and fatalities. Agencies, still, have limited knowledge about the real impact of services to families in their own homes, particularly as it relates to the well-being of kids living in situations with chronic neglect, where parents are impaired by substances or untreated mental health issues.
Instead of being fearful of this administration, or remaining flat-footed in the shadow of a president with such bombast, let’s step outside our bubbles, stop talking amongst ourselves, blaming and demonizing each other, and start showing the same courage and confidence that it takes for a caseworker to get out of their car in the middle of the night to knock on the door of a family in trouble. We have an obligation to bring our stories of accomplishment and challenge right to the front door of this administration.
In November, the New York Times published “What Ever Happened to the Lady Jaguars,” which revisits the lives of several young women at the heart of a feature story printed more than a decade ago. This follow-up piece highlights how these young women have spiraled through “helping” systems, including child welfare — both as kids and adults.
The author, John Branch, with whom I emailed, provides us with the bittersweet stories that should be mandatory reading for all new cabinet members whose responsibilities include the health, safety and well-being of families. Far better than any data, or fancy research people are already preparing to bring on their visits to the Hill, this article reminds us of the impact of intergenerational transmissions of trauma, poverty, social isolation and marginalized communities without making any special case for consideration, except the obvious one. Speaking to this administration, we probably don’t want to say that “it takes a village,” but Branch’s article does it for us by guiding, not dragging, us to conclusions about the interplay between the social drivers of health and well-being and personal choices.
Branch told me that for most of these young women, the child welfare system has been a constant in their lives. All have experienced multisystem shuffles through the years, desperately trying to recreate a family that makes sense, and provides safety, stability and attachment.
We have compelling stories of kids, parents, professional helpers and volunteers. Stories of failure and redemption, as well as the mistakes and heroic actions that happen each day. We have decades of progress and evolved thinking, and vestiges of intransigence and outdated models of supporting families.
We might not like the response, but we have the responsibility to knock on the door and let the new leader know we are here.
