Child welfare is stuck in an ever-evolving game that never requires the courage to disrupt
I love playing the game Jenga, and I am not alone. Jenga, an imperative form of the Swahili word, kujenga (meaning to build), has been sold in over 100 countries and has sold more than 100 million sets since Leslie Scott created it in Ghana in the 1970s.
The conventional strategy for playing Jenga — to never disrupt or disturb the foundation — is a powerful metaphor for the enduring challenges in the American child welfare system.
For years the child welfare system has made a series of incremental improvements. But these improvements never disrupt or disturb the system’s basic foundational assumptions. The system takes the position that it knows what is best for every child it encounters. It narrowly defines child abuse and knows exactly how to identify it. The system knows what healthy parenting should look like and it has a formula for it. And the child welfare system believes its job is to rescue children. These foundational assumptions were present at the inception of child welfare services and continue to reverberate through child welfare protocols and procedures.
When a person plays Jenga, the goal is to maintain the structure by removing pieces and placing them back on the top of the Jenga system. Players do whatever they can to avoid the foundational blocks because they know that once those are disturbed, the tower is coming down.
This is a reminder that the folks who are thwarting the true revolution of child welfare are usually well-intentioned, intelligent and highly strategic thinkers. These folks have skillfully maintained a massive and incrementally evolving child welfare system for decades.
But to date, there continue to be systemic fault lines which lead to deleterious and sometimes catastrophic outcomes for families. It has evolved; it has restructured programs; it has improved policies. But in general, these adjustments remove blocks and put them right back on top of the same foundation. Evolving in this way keeps the child welfare system chugging along. It shows effort over time. But the outcomes for families, especially families who are racially and economically disadvantaged, rarely change or improve.
Is anyone else tired of this game?
Evolutionary changes that make the system better and revolutionary changes that disrupt the system and force it to operate differently are often seen as being at odds with each other. But I believe they can work in tandem. Evolutionary change is necessary, but it must happen in tandem with paradigmatic shifts in the foundations of the system.
The American child welfare system claims to protect children and help families. These are well-intended, noble goals, but they are shortsighted and at times culturally insensitive. Revolutionary change must reach beyond these noble ideas by radically altering the operations within child welfare. We can no longer settle for incremental improvements that appease funders and policymakers. We must commit to challenging the foundation of child welfare so that the changes make direct impacts for families.
Some scholars believe that the basic and foundational premise of child protection should remain intact and untouched. The fact that the foundation of child welfare services is culturally insensitive, largely inequitable and that it operates with outdated platitudes, has not been enough to persuade people that revolutionary change is both possible and prudent. These scholars (and practitioners) believe that the presumptive foundations of child welfare are not the problem.
But research has shown that even child welfare professionals believe that the system is constantly “improving,” and embracing reform, but that it is somehow still in stasis. In the Urban Institute report “Running to Keep in Place,” respondents in the study perceived the constantly moving system as actually going backward; “moving in the opposite direction.”
This is the case for many systems that are stuck in a cycle of evolutionary change. Evolutionary change centers the survival of the system. The goal is to keep the system upright and in existence. When the goal is the system’s existence, leaders, practitioners, and policymakers — all of the cogs of the system — will do whatever it takes to keep the system in place — even when the evidence shows that decades of reforms have not rendered the results we desire.
Now is the time to disrupt the foundation of the American child welfare system. Real change requires us to ask some difficult questions. What would it take for kinship care to become the rule and non-relative foster care the exception? What if the millions of dollars that we place in foster care were abruptly shifted to extended family members through kinship placements? What if child safety was a family and community decision, not a courtroom decision?
I will never discourage or discount systems that work to do and be better. However, at this point, refusing to alter the foundations of child welfare is negligent. This refusal will result in continued workforce dysfunction and community harm. Families in our communities need the child welfare system to look and feel different. We need to show up in people’s lives in a way that communicates compassion and a humane understanding of the structures that underpin their family’s challenges.
It is time to dig into the foundational assumptions, inherent power and biases that guide every policy and operational procedure within the American child welfare system. And yes, that digging will disrupt and disturb the foundation of a system that we have always known — and it will take courage to create something new.
