Child welfare agencies can and should move their efforts further upstream, stopping the traumatic and harmful sorting through families that currently happens at their front door. That is the highest and best outcome that could result from any of the reform work emanating from inside child welfare systems — changing how they work with families at their front door.
But the concept of prevention in child welfare finds itself confounded by a persistent enigma — not only determining when and how prevention should be done, but why, as well as by and for whom.
Of course we should try to prevent harm rather than wait to intervene. However, in much of today’s discourse, the prevailing public sentiment leans heavily against child welfare playing a role in prevention — except to get out of the way. Child welfare leaders might find it useful to ask: what might it take to lean into another way of thinking and behaving?
Two converging narratives have limited the space available for thinking about and operationalizing new policies, protocols, and practices focused on prevention, not intervention, inside child welfare systems. The first is an internal narrative around prevention services in child welfare that is narrowly focused on child protection and therefore sees adults primarily through the lens of a suspected maltreatment report.
Inside the child welfare business model at its best, the role of prevention has been to insert itself into the lives of families because someone has called to say they are worried about the possibility of harm to children. So even when investigators are not able to substantiate harm, the mere existence of a report triggers a worry (inside the system) that it may eventually happen. The result: child welfare agencies develop a cadre of services to respond to unsubstantiated harm that look a lot like the services they deliver when they substantiate harm —interventions that mostly amount to varying levels of surveillance.
Even the measures used to evaluate these interventions — repeated maltreatment, entry and re-entry into foster care — are primarily aligned with child maltreatment, not with indicators of family capacity and well-being. The result: too many parents the system encounters find themselves struggling unsuccessfully to either keep their kids out of care or to get them back home. Ironically, while the system’s surveillance of these families often confirms that their struggle is real, it is not a struggle the system was designed to ameliorate. A system designed to be a hammer therefore finds it hard to stop looking for nails.
The external narrative in child welfare is equally constraining because the public message when it comes to families who are struggling is often more about surveillance than it is about prevention, showing up as the often maligned but rarely replaced set of external mandated reporting laws and policies that lean heavily into some version of “if you see something, say something.”
But the harsh reality is that, as a society, when we look at people who do not conform to our notion of what “normal” is, who are not living the same life we are — we may not know what we are seeing. And frankly, while most of us probably know what abuse looks like, we rarely know much about what “risk of harm” looks like, nor can we easily recognize the kinds of escalating conditions families face that are so readily collapsed into the wide-ranging and murky category of neglect.
Everyone is therefore making up their own criteria. So, the community default is to report, leaving the decision about what will happen to the family with the agency and its workers.
The reality is that neither the internal nor the external narrative drive us toward a system that is really prepared to address root causes, the reasons why families are struggling. Any significant shift to prevention will require that child welfare change the lens through which it sees families, finding ways to intervene in how faltering social determinants of health may be showing up as crises in the lives of adults and their children, and therefore bringing them to the attention of a child protection lens.
A system focused on documenting what happened, and not why, will find it difficult to support adults who are facing the inevitable day-to-day battles that are associated with economic deprivation, social isolation, and the institutional barriers and biases that characterize life in under-resourced and under-served communities.
However, too often it is this struggle and these conditions, and not actual harm, which the laws of the child protection system then use to judge whether these adults can be protective of their children.
Big public systems such as child welfare do not like adults because when they show up at the agency’s front door, we make assumptions about who they are and blame them for why they are there. It is those assumptions and the system behaviors they drive that are the primary impediment to moving prevention upstream inside child welfare systems. There is a significant dissonance between what systems know about and ask of families, and how families see their own capabilities and needs.
In child welfare, families typically get measured by their behaviors. Instead of recognizing and building upon the noble efforts they make every day just to survive, we obsess over whether they cooperate and complete the mandated tasks assigned to them in their case plan, whether they talk or act a certain way — in short, whether they do what the system asks them to do, in the way the system defines as satisfactory and appropriate.
This approach puts all the responsibility on the adults in a family and almost none on the system. Their lack of cooperation, their failure to meet a predetermined standard of parental success, is why they are being investigated and why their children are in foster care. They are the ones who need to do something different.
We fail to ask ourselves, as participants in these systems, what we need to do differently. The result: the gap that emerges between “they” and “we” grows so wide and difficult to maneuver in that they do not trust us and we cannot find a path to working with them upstream, so we keep defaulting to surveillance.
We need the rules, mandates and policies of child welfare to worry about adults as much as our current model asks us to worry about their children. We must be willing to ask the kinds of questions that help us get to know and honor the journeys of the families we encounter.
None of us believes that child welfare systems are the first “go-to” place we want for families. That work must and should be centered inside communities, — leveraging and building on the assets and strengths of families, their neighbors, and local stakeholders —where families can build relationships and not just get programs and services.
It would be a mistake, however, to believe that a focus on community alone will be enough. The child welfare agency, itself, must be willing to examine and disrupt its behaviors when families are brought to their attention, stepping away from policies and protocols that see family intervention narrowly through a lens of child maltreatment.
Until we make a major shift in the drivers that push families who need support to the child welfare front door and create a space for child welfare to operate that does not live inside the implicit assumptions that the system makes about adults, we will not be able to move prevention upstream and work with families outside the current surveillance frame.
We must be willing to measure a child welfare agency by the work it does to improve the fate of families whom they choose not to investigate. Only then will a system designed to be a hammer stop looking for nails.
