The most common challenges facing the US child welfare system are foster care placement influx, poor physical and mental outcomes, and prolonged childcare periods. The number of foster placements, especially among African-American children, is significantly high, indicating the presence of ethnic disparities inherent in the system and increasingly weakening family ties contrary to the system’s goal to strengthen family relations. The association problems like academic failures and youth delinquency with child welfare histories indicate the unsatisfactory outcomes of the US child welfare system. Similarly, the longtime children spend under childcare programs, and the lack of permanency in foster placements suggest the system’s inefficiency and ineffectiveness. A social worker can rely on a sound understanding of the root causes of these challenges to develop practical solutions to the particular US child welfare problems. Social workers can improve child welfare by enhancing their intercultural skills, fostering collaboration with different entities, and leveraging early child welfare interventions to address the specific problems in the current US child welfare system.
Enhancing Intercultural Skills to Address the Child Welfare Placement Influx in the US
A social worker can leverage the knowledge of the ethnic disparities inherent in the US child welfare system to address the influx in child welfare placement by enhancing and applying intercultural skills when administering child care. The Native and African-American children contribute to the high rate of foster care placement in the US. According to Foster America (2022), 1 in 9 African-American children and 1 in 7 Native American children spend time under the child welfare system between the age of 1 and 18. Therefore, one can view the issue as an ethnic concern embedded in the system, thus calling for the need to address the issue from a cultural perspective. To address this issue, social workers should acquire necessary intercultural skills to prevent unnecessary placements among children of low socioeconomic status, thus significantly reducing the placement rate (Zlotnik, 2018). The US spends approximately $ 30 billion per year on child welfare. Minimizing ethnic disparities would reduce expenditure and promote efficiency in the child welfare system (Foster America, 2022).
Also, addressing the ethnicity-related foster children influx demands enhancing public intercultural awareness. Some black and Native Americans who end up in foster homes do so because the public, as a critical player in the child welfare system, reports unjustifiable events that may result in harm to children or others. However, some of these events may be harmless to the child, but ethnic prejudice compels some public members to view some scenarios as harmful to children and society. For instance, the belief that African-Americans are capable of committing different crimes would lead a member of the public to misinterpret a black parent’s efforts to discipline their child ordinarily, as a form of abuse. Therefore, creating public awareness of interculturalism would lead to cultural tolerance in society and prevent unwarranted foster care placements (Zlotnik, 2018).
Promoting Better Child Welfare Outcomes in the US through Diverse Collaboration
The current US child welfare system bears undesirable outcomes, such as poor academic outcomes for foster children. Only 50% of children in child welfare programs complete their education (Foster America, 2022). The other half fails to complete their high school education because of the cognitive impairments that children develop as they go through unstable placements, live with new people, and are away from their families. The children develop trauma, which results in the deterioration of their cognitive abilities, making learning difficult (Papovich, 2020). Also, the traumatizing experience results in negative behavior changes that contribute to the children’s constant absenteeism, truancy, and delinquency. According to Zlotnik (2018), social workers would rely on understanding the program’s traumatizing nature to foster collaboration between children in the welfare programs to create a sense of belonging among children and positive emotional development.
Similarly, inter-agency collaboration would reduce youth delinquency among children with child welfare histories. According to Foster America (2022), 70% of minors involved in the US juvenile justice system have histories of child welfare. While this information may lead one to blame the poor outcome on the welfare workers, it is essential to consider the possibility of failures in other agencies to dissociate the welfare system from youth crimes. Therefore, there is a need to strengthen the existing and create new inter-agency collaborations to prevent the high prevalence of youth delinquency among foster children. Collaborating with entities like the US judicial system and drug and substance abuse agencies would help a social worker determine if the outcome results from a failure in the child welfare system or other departments’ actions and inactions (Zlotnik, 2018).
Leveraging Early Interventions to Promote Foster Placement Permanency in the US
Social workers can rely on their understanding of the problematic foster placement permanency to leverage early childhood interventions to stabilize child welfare placement. The US foster care system aims at creating permanent placement of children under foster care. However, the deterioration of physical, emotional, and mental states among children under foster care makes it challenging to achieve permanent placements. Therefore, addressing the permanency issue requires early interventions at different levels to promote positive mental and physical development during early childhood (Papovich, 2020). One early intervention would be to strengthen family relationships. Children end up in foster care due to intimate partner violence, drug abuse, and violence against children, which lead to family breakdown and the need for child protection services (Munger et al., 2022). Children in their early learning should be informed about the structural functionalism of the family to prepare them to accept possible unfriendly changes in the future. Children’s understanding that placement in a foster home is essential for their wellbeing and the functioning of the family and society would prevent negative mental and emotional development and allow them to accept new families and adapt quickly.
Similarly, early childhood education should focus on positive social development practices to promote children’s adaptability to new families and environments. Social workers can push for the use of such learning and teaching practices as story tables to foster children’s development of essential skills like cooperation and teamwork. For instance, children’s play activities should allow interactions between different children to build a child’s capacity to operate and thrive in dynamic environments and coexist with diverse people (Pyle & Danniels, 2017). Such teaching and learning practices would help students develop a positive mental link to diversity and prevent their overreliance on their family members for social connection. Hence, children would be more prepared to coexist with their foster families and minimize the regular shifts from home to another and their associated traumatic effects.
Also, social workers can restore foster placement permanency in the US child welfare system by using effective evidence-based early psychological interventions like storytelling. Children’s traumatizing experiences that necessitate child welfare interventions significantly impact their responses to the interventions. For instance, child neglect can make it difficult for the child to accept a new family as the child associates family with similar neglect, thus leading to the child’s placement in multiple homes (Zeanah & Humphreys, 2018). Therefore, the early intervention should consider restoring children’s mental state before placing them in a foster home to prevent deterioration of the trauma, and development of chronic stress and facilitate permanent placement. For instance, during the first interaction with a child who has undergone physical abuse, a social worker can tell the child a short story about characters who rose from similar experiences to inspire the child’s resilience. Then the social worker may ask the child to retell the story with them as the protagonist. As the child tells and retells the story, their confidence to open up the about the experience increases until the child sees themselves as the hero in the whole experience. The therapeutic intervention would enable the child to proceed to the placement phase with a positive mental state thus enabling them to quickly fit in and accept their new family and residence.
Conclusion
The US child welfare system faces numerous challenges such as increasing foster care placements, poor welfare intervention outcomes, and the lack of foster placement permanency. Understanding these challenges and their causes enables a social worker to develop solutions to address the specific problems individually and restore efficiency and effectiveness in the system. Addressing the problem of increased placements requires the use of intercultural skills to mitigate the ethnicity embedded in the US child welfare system and reduce the high demand and cost of child welfare services. Likewise, the diversification of collaborations to strengthen, children and interagency relationships would help promote better outcomes in the US child welfare programs. Also, understanding how children’s emotional and mental states affect their response to foster care placement reveals the need for a social worker to emphasize early child welfare interventions to address the specific problem of foster placement instability in the US child welfare system.
However, these interventions are limited in addressing the disparities between outcomes of abused children living at home and those in foster homes. For instance, research shows that 20% of abused children living in foster homes experience post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms, while 11% of abused children living at home experience PTSD symptoms (Papovich, 2020). Therefore future research on addressing the challenges in the US child welfare system needs to address the differences to establish whether the system’s benefits outweigh the negative mental effects or recommend the elimination of foster care programs or replace it with another program with more positive children’s mental outcomes.
References
Foster America. (2022). The Problem. Retrieved from: https://www.foster-america.org/the-problem
Munger, K. F., Stegenga, S. M., Storie, S. O., & Wennerstrom, E. K. (2022). Addressing challenges at the intersection of early intervention and child welfare. Child Abuse & Neglect, 105852.
Papovich, C. (2020). Trauma & children in foster care: A comprehensive overview. Forensic Scholars Today, 5(4), 1-5.
Pyle, A., & Danniels, E. (2017). A continuum of play-based learning: The role of the teacher in play-based pedagogy and the fear of hijacking play. Early Education and Development, 28(3), 274-289.
Zeanah, C. H., & Humphreys, K. L. (2018). Child abuse and neglect. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 57(9), 637-644.
Zlotnik, J. L. (2018). Preparing social workers for child welfare practice: Lessons from a historical review of the literature. Evaluation Research in Child Welfare: Improving Outcomes Through University-Public Agency Partnerships, 5-21.
write