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I had to think on this awhile. I have always been passionate about child welfare. But as I wrote this I realized how the focus of that passion has grown and shifted. The story reads:
You know, no one gets up in the morning and says, “Gee, I think I’ll hurt my kid today.” But, I didn’t know that when I started, bright eyed and bushy tailed in child welfare. Sure, I had the passion to keep children from being abused and neglected and was willing to work incredible hours each week as a child abuse investigator. And I was good at it. I was able to establish rapport and interview children about the abuse they suffered at the hands of their parents. I was able to hear their stories. I became passionate to hone my skills so that children would not be left in dangerous situations because my interviews would not bear scrutiny in a court.
But there was still so much I didn’t know. It was easy for newbies like me to demonize the parents. And in the US, we tended to put our energy and our funding into removing children and punishing the parents. We made it a matter of individual failure. And children bounced around in the foster care system with no sense of permanency. Slowly, in the process of learning to hear children, I began to “hear” parents. I began to realize the tremendous burdens many of them carried. I began to see them as human beings, not child abusers. And I began to recognize the many injustices in the child protection systems.
And so my passion changed. I grew to believe that we should be willing to spend as much money to keep families together as we were willing to spend to keep children in foster care. I began to see that family was much larger than just the parents. If Mom or Dad could not step up, perhaps another family member could. I began to perceive that there were options short of removal to help children be safe in their homes. Granted, we had to look to other countries, notably New Zealand and Australia for programs designed to build on parental strengths and/or that recognized the need to involve the larger family. I began to understand, at a visceral level, how desperately children need family connections.
I did not put on my rose-colored glasses. Truly there are times when children cannot be safe in their homes. But I am less prone to quickly jump to judgment. It is not enough if we save the body but kill the soul. Today, my passion for assuring safety is tempered by a passion for helping families make the changes needed to rear their children in a safe and nurturing way. I am an advocate for funding for resources. I am an advocate for realizing the strength and problem- solving abilities of family networks that can mobilize around protection. I understand: This family did not get up today and decide to hurt their child.
