Soaring rates of childhood poverty should wake up child protection policy makers

Reports out of the United States this week speak about soaring rates of children living in poverty, too often accompanied with homelessness. The National Centre on Family Homelessness states that there are 2.5 million children who were homeless for at least part of the year in 2013.

Neglect, one of the most common issues that child protection faces, is driven in very many respects, by poverty. The reasons are many, but include:

• inadequate shelter places children at risk of illness;
• many families are forced to find space in high crime, high risk areas;
• parents may be forced to leave children with inadequate caregivers while they try to hold on to marginal wage jobs;
• homelessness makes it hard to get kids to school;
• there is a lot of stress on parents trying to manage homelessness increasing risks of various forms of maltreatment;
• children may be recruited into petty crimes like shoplifting as a way to try to get food and other necessities;
• children lose connections to friends and community programs as families wander from place to place;
• parents find it hard to meet the emotional needs of their children.

It would not be hard to add to this list. When child protection becomes involved, parents are seen as neglecting children. However, this is not the kind of neglect that typically is related to a parent's lack of desire to do the right thing for their child. Rather, it is the reality of living without resources.

Taking children into foster care may be the limited solution available in many cases but it is a poor solution. It adds unnecessary pressure to the child protection system in the form of increased case loads and heavier demands on placements.

The National Centre on Family Homelessness points out that there are solutions. These can include increasing access to low cost housing; subsidized day care so parents can work; feeding programs; improving educational opportunities for parents. There can also be family oriented shelter programs (such as the Inn from the Cold program in Calgary, Alberta). 

The long terms costs of homelessness are seen in the children not being able to get an education and themselves entering the cycle of poverty. Homelessness adds to that cycle and the cost to society is long term. Chronic homelessness can be tackled. The City of Medicine Hat in souther Alberta has reported that they are on the brink of accomplishing this. But it took targeted efforts.

Racial Bias in Child Protection

The question of racial bias in child protection is a crucial one that is not often subject to systemic research. There is an apparent case that it does exist as non-Caucasian children are over represented in child welfare systems in both Canada, Australia and the United States, for example. A question that is in need of review is whether this is due to racial bias or other factors.

In Canada, there has been a series of public policies that have targeted Aboriginal populations. The Residential Schools that ran for over 50 years (with the last one being closed in 1996) meant that several generations of children were removed from parental care. They did not get healthy, culturally significant parenting modeled to them. To the contrary, they received harsh, emotionally and physically abusive (and at times sexually abusive) caregiving. They did not receive the nurturing parenting that created a basis upon which they would know how to care for their own children.

Canada also saw the implementation of policies designed to remove large numbers of children from Aboriginal parental care and placing children in non-Aboriginal homes. This came to be known as the “60s scoop”. Australia saw some similar policies.

Research in the United Sates has shown that black populations are over represented in the child protection system there. Research by Berger et a., (n.d.) raised the question of whether this racial bias might be systemic. They concluded that racial bias is more evident when subjective decisions must be made.

However, their research also indicates that many of the expected bias results were better accounted for socio-demographic issues. Clearly, poverty is one of the most powerful. It can be strenuously argued that, if we really seek to address a lot of child protection concerns, we need to address the question of poverty. A significant portion of child protection caseloads involve economically distressed families. This is particularly so for questions of maltreatment. Thus, we may be bringing into care children because we are not prepared, as a society, to address these fundamental economic questions.

Research that I have reviewed in earlier blogs shows that children growing up in the care of child protection authorities tend to have much poorer long term outcomes as opposed to growing up in their own families. This is true even if those families are just good enough. Thus, the long term societal problems grow because we do not address the question of poverty. This can be construed in the classic economic argument of the rich v. poor and the need for the redistribution of wealth. Given the increasing gaps between the rich and the rest of society, that is a tempting argument.

But it is not one that is likely to influence present political structures where taxpayers are pressing government to be more frugal. We see economic collapses in major economies in several countries. Curiously, of course, such forces will increase poverty and raise the number of maltreatment cases that child protection must address. That in turn, will increase the cost to society.

In the alternative, child protection budgets may not increase resulting in changes to the kinds of cases the get opened. When resources are tight, the threshold for opening a case rises.

Rather than looking at the redistribution of wealth, one might also recognize that costs in the long term for taxpayers go down as we solve these poverty issues. Children who grow up in care cost us dearly – not just in the day to day costs of the state being their caregivers. They tend to have much higher rates of mental illness, crime, substance abuse, incarceration and unemployment. Their children are more likely to also be brought into care. This is very expensive.

Of course, this is not a new argument but it is one that has, thus far, fallen on fallow ground. As citizens, we have trained our politicians to look at shorter term outcomes because we want immediate results. Societies today have little interest in long term thinking. We want solutions now! These are problems that cannot be solved in the now.

Reference:

Berger,L., McDaniel, M., & Paxson, C. (n.d.). Assessing Parenting Behaviors across Racial Groups: Implications for the Child Welfare System. Unpublished manuscript. Downloaded 2012/05/26 at http://socwork.wisc.edu/files/race_parenting_SSR_final.pdf

Texas child death story highlights prevention need

A story appearing this week in San Antoni, Texas talks about continuing concern with the effectiveness of child protection to prevent the deaths of children from abuse by caregivers, mainly parents. The importance of the story is really the piece that does not get highlighted in the headlines. It is twofold - the impact of the economic failures in the past several years and the failures to properly fund prevention services.

When we look at the economic crisis that has been prevalent in the world economies, the abuse, neglect and maltreatment of children appears to be one of the consequences. Families most directly hit by the downturn find themselves struggling to put food on the table and provide shelter. These pressures create poverty induced effects on families that can bring child protection into the household. As a society, we need to face the crisis not as a family failure but rather as a failure of society. Too often, the marginalized populations find themselves involved with CPS. Social workers must respond to what goes on in the family, but when will we as a society be willing to address the root causes?

This leads to the second issue which is the underfunding of prevention services. When social policy is driven by the most recent child protection fatality, it is response services that get the funding. Certainly good funding is needed here so that caseloads are not out of control and CPS response times are reasonable. But good social policy is also about preventing problems through things like home care nursing, teen pregnancy supports, domestic violence interventions and so on. These programs help to reduce the need for child protection and will also aid in preserving family units which is the goal of most child protection legislation.

Too often, children are involved in child protection programs because of the pressures in families that arise from larger social issues that society is not addressing.

The Poverty Narrative

A recent story in the Huffungton Post suggests that a majority of children are in foster care for reasons largely connected to poverty. The focus is on the notion that children are being neglected because parents cannot afford to meet the needs of the children. The article also suggests a series of other somewhat nefarious intrusions by child protective services in the United States.

Poverty and child protection have been issues that have been linked for decades. There would be little doubt that the poor have a long history of over representation in child protection systems. Indeed, if one looks at the early roots of this work, it was the friendly visitor who would come to help the less fortunate. Yet, there are also early cases of horrific abuse that also stood out.

Critics, such as the author of this Huffington Post article talk about how the media focuses on the high profile, emotional stories that tug at the public's anger and causes politicians to become enraged. I agree that these are typically the stories that get the media attention and rarely does the media talk about the cases where child welfare has kept families together; offered services that reunified families that needed intervention; helped parents get sober and then raise their children.  The media doesn't like those stories very much - they don't garner the attention.

One has to wonder why the critics do not slam the media for the attention on the stories that push politicians to over react and then thrust child protection to be more intrusive.

The question of poverty though remains crucial. It is easy to blame child protection for being intrusive when not asking society at large why they remain so unwilling to solve the problems of poverty. Why are we so unwilling might be linked to our unwillingness to pay the taxes. It might also be because we have seen such failed efforts at the "welfare" state in places like the United Kingdom.

Economic policies that continue to create greater divides between the wealthy and the poor will only add to the child protection system needs.

As the world economy gets worse, there will be greater pressures on child protection systems. More children will come into care because of poverty related issues.  This can be seen in a tragic case in Greece reported in the Sydney Morning Herald where a family struck down by economics sought the placement of some of their children.

There are also public policies that will ensure more children come into care. In Canada, we are seeing the introduction of new crime legislation that will result in more people going to jail. This will have many negative consequences on Canadian society that will include parents not being able to look after children or families sliding into poverty as the bread winner goes to jail. I am certainly not supporting crime, but one must consider the downstream impacts of legislation.

There are no easy solutions for child protection who act as society's clean up scheme when we are unwilling to collectively address the core issues that exist. I agree with the author of the Huffington Post article that children are, in many cases, not better off in foster care. But children will end up there if we are not going to address the larger systemic issues.

As the Lilly Manning story shows, the solutions can be as bad or worse than the original problems.

However, I must take exception to the author of the Huffington Post story that social workers, lawyers and judges live with a master narrative of parents as brutal, devious and monstrous. This may be his experience but it is not mine. Yes, I have met those parents - the ones who do brutally abuse their children or the ones whose addiction is so profound that the children are significantly neglected or the parent who sexually abuses their children. But mainly I have met parents who try to sort their way through poverty or other adverse events in life. I have met lawyers, judges, social workers who believe strongly that finding ways to support families and keep them together is the preferred solution. This is not to suggest that mistakes are  not made - but it is to suggest that, at least in my experience, that the master narrative that he suggests is not so pervasive.