Child Welfare and Social Policy: An Essential Reader

Linking state child care and child welfare policies and populations: Implications for children, families, and policymakers

The paper’s starting point is an analysis of New Labour’s agenda for children in an emergent ‘social investment state’. It provides an overview of policies for children, which simultaneously invest in children and regulate them and their parents/mothers. Although children have moved to the heart of social policy, there is some disquiet about the way they are being positioned in this brave new world of social investment. This disquiet focuses in particular on: the construction of children as ‘becomings’ rather than ‘beings’; the paid-work-focused and future-oriented model of citizenship; the relative neglect of groups of children who are not seen to represent such a good investment; and the eclipse of parents’, and in particular, mothers’ welfare. The final section sketches out how the social investment approach might be modified in the interests of children’s well-being and flourishing and with reference to principles of (gendered) social justice.

Children, childhoods and bilingualism: Exploring experiences, perspectives and policies

The center for regional and tribal child welfare studies: Students’ experiences of an Anishinaabe-centered social work education program

The professional child welfare literature offers little guidance to child welfare managers and agency policy makers about the use of social media to search for or communicate with clients. Ethical social media use relies upon e-professionalism, defined as the professional identity established by workers through the way they utilize digital communications. This article offers considerations for standards of e-professionalism in child welfare policy and practice. Specific considerations are outlined for social media policy and practice scenarios are offered, which can be used to prompt agency discussions with child welfare workers.

Around the world, child welfare systems provide essential services to protect the lives of children who are abused and neglected. Yet these systems can also do great harm. Moral Injury within the US Child Welfare System is based on over 30 years of in-depth, ethnographic research examining the experiences of parents, children, and frontline professionals involved in child welfare systems over time in the United States and across cultures in informal African American and Indigenous systems and formal Japanese and Scottish systems. It argues that US child welfare policies and procedures are overdetermined by adversarial justice system values and practices and underdetermined by social work values and practices. This imbalance leads to the relative silencing of children’s, parents’, and frontline professionals’ voices, that is, to epistemic injustice. When the voices of those within the system are silenced, then systemic racism and other biases remain unchecked; and interventions offered may be irrelevant or ineffective, introduce additional obstacles to already stressed families, and miss incidents of ongoing maltreatment. A system characterized by epistemic injustice also creates vulnerabilities for psychological harm to those within it, that is, to moral injury. Such psychological harm can, in turn, weaken the system itself by undermining parents’ and children’s abilities to engage in services, retention of experienced professionals, and communities’ abilities to thrive. We consider the implications of various ways of “doing” child welfare that prioritize psychosocial and community well-being alongside physical safety for creating a more epistemically just, effective US public child welfare system.

Current guidelines recommend screen time limitations for young children in favor of their ongoing development and well-being. Distinguishing momentary patterns of screen use in relation to childhood well-being will further inform screen time recommendations to better reflect contemporary childhood digital experiences. To investigate the associations between momentary children's screen use, parent-child interactions, emotions, and externalizing behavior. In this ecological momentary assessment (EMA) study, parent-reported methodology was used to measure children's screen-based experiences. Reporting on the last hour, assessments were provided up to 3 times per weekday and 5 times per weekend day, across a 2-week period from May to November 2024. Parents completed momentary assessments in their everyday environments, capturing typical fluctuations in children's habits, emotions, and behaviors. Participants identified as parents of children in the first 3 years of formal schooling. Children's use of screens including screen use, duration, activities, and solo vs co-use details. Children's momentary affect, externalizing behaviors, and parent-child interactions were measured using subsets of items from the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule Short form, the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire, and the Child Parent Relationship Scale-Short form, respectively. A total of 934 momentary assessments from 42 parents (mean [SD] age, 38.7 [4.9] years; 33 female [79%]) of children (mean [SD] age, 6.4 [1.2] years; 24 male [57%];) were included in analyses. Multilevel modeling indicated screen use duration was associated with lower levels of both positive affect (b = -0.16; 95% CI, -0.30 to -0.02; estimating screen time b = -0.05; 95% CI, -0.08 to -0.01) and negative affect (b = -0.12; 95% CI, -0.24 to -0.01; estimating screen time b = -0.10; 95% CI, -0.15 to -0.06). Interactive activities (b = 0.26; 95% CI, 0.04-0.47) and co-use (b = 0.17; 95% CI, 0-0.34) were significantly associated with positive affect. Parent-child interactions negatively estimated screen use duration (b = -0.07; 95% CI, -0.13 to -0.02). Results of this study suggest that the associations between children's digital experiences and well-being are complex and bidirectional. The momentary associations found in this study provide evidence for moving beyond duration-focused recommendations toward context-sensitive guidelines that consider the dynamic nature of children's digital experiences.

Division 37 of the American Psychological Association (APA), the Society for Child and Family Policy and Practice, was founded in 1978. The impetus for its formation was to draw together individuals interested in advocacy and social policy for children and families. The founding members were from the Section on Clinical Child Psychology, then Section 1 of the Division of Clinical Psychology, Division 12 of APA (Routh & Culbertson, 1996). Through revisions of the division name, essential components have remained: application of psychological knowledge through advocacy for the welfare of families, children, and youth. The division has been a leader within APA in child mental health efforts, opposition to violence, and child welfare. Historically, Division 37 was regarded as a public interest division, but it has also had a substantial interest in practice and education.

The number of Latino children involved with the child welfare system has more than doubled in the past 15 years, currently representing 21 percent of known cases of child maltreatment (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration on Children, Youth and Families (HHS, ACYF), 1997, 2009). Culturally appropriate services are in dire need, and care placements appeal to the family system fundamental to Latino culture. Evidence suggests placements result in fewer moves and instances of reentering care, better opportunities for maintaining contact with birth family, and faster sibling placements (Cuddeback, 2004; Winokur, Rozen, Thompson, Green, & Valentine, 2005). Unfortunately, most child welfare policies ineffectively deal with issues unique to Latinos, such as cultural norms, mixed documentation status within households, and high rates of poverty. This commentary explores the multifaceted barriers Latino care providers are likely to encounter as their lived experiences intersect with child welfare, welfare reform, and immigration policies. We posited that culturally sensitive practice and policy can reduce some strains experienced by Latino families involved with child welfare and supports care as a viable placement option. BACKGROUND Types of Kinship Care Traditionally, care includes formal and informal care. Formal occurs when children are placed in state custody, whereas informal arrangements do not involve the child welfare system. Within formal caregiving, placements can be foster care--where relative caregivers become licensed providers, or volunteer care--where a child is placed with a relative without seeking state custody (Geen, 2004). These distinctions significantly affect the type and amount of payment caregivers can receive as well as access to supports and services (for example, mental health). Latino Kinship Care and Licensing Difficulties Latino families' ability to be licensed foster placements are complicated by a limited definition of kin, immigration issues, and lack of language-appropriate services. The family system plays a pivotal role in the lives of Latino families and individuals. Central are familismo, which refers to the importance of family unity that contributes to the well-being of the family and extended family (Cauce & Domenech-Rodriguez, 2000), and compadrazgo, which is co-parenthood akin to godparents (padrinos) that forms social and religious ties between families and the selected godparents (Barrio & Hughes, 2000). These concepts produce strong family loyalties extending beyond the nuclear family to include networks and non-blood relations (Hurtado, 1995). Unfortunately, federal and state policies ignore these non-blood networks, as such people are ineligible for licensure. In the majority of states kinship is narrowly defined through blood relation, marriage, or adoption. Only 21 states adhere to a broader definition that includes non-blood ties like friends, neighbors, or godparents (Leos-Urbel, Bess, & Geen, 2000). Latino families are unable to be licensed foster caregivers if they live in a mixed-documentation household, in which nearly three in five (62 percent) U.S. Latino children reside (National Council of La Raza, 2009). A mixed-documentation household has one or more people living in a home who are undocumented immigrants. Caregivers in these situations may refrain from becoming a licensed placement due to requirements like background checks that require caregivers and people in the household 16 years and older to provide fingerprints and valid photo identification. Family members who want to be licensed caregivers may place themselves or others in danger of deportation, especially in light of anti-inmaigrant policies (for example, Arizona's SB1070, Prop 200) that mandate child welfare workers to enter homes and report immigration status. …

Reviewed by: Taking Stock: Scottish Social Welfare after Devolution David Smith Taking Stock: Scottish Social Welfare after Devolution. By John Stewart. Pp. iv, 171. ISBN 1 8613 4523 2. Bristol: Policy Press. 2004. £15.99. In this book John Stewart, who views Scotland from the vantage point of Oxford Brookes University, discusses the development of welfare policies in Scotland since devolution. The substantive areas on which he focuses are education, including lifelong learning and child welfare policies, and health, as the policy fields in which the Scottish Executive has the greatest degree of autonomy. These discussions are preceded by three chapters on the background and extent of devolution, welfare and expenditure in Scotland compared with the rest of the UK, and Scottish patterns of poverty, inequality and deprivation. These are clear and informative, though at times limited by the author's focus on the specifics of policy-making: for example, Stewart mentions 'the obvious but crucial point'(p.53) that Scotland has become an increasingly segregated society, but neither the nature of this segregation nor its obviousness is explained. In discussing education and health, Stewart concentrates on the ways in which policy in Scotland has diverged, or may diverge in future, from New Labour orthodoxy in England. Necessarily, he often has to rely on the words of Scottish ministers rather than their deeds, as when (p. 145) he cites Jack McConnell's claim that 'social justice for any one of us only comes through social justice for all' and treats this as marking a 'clear and deliberate contrast to the fragmentation and alienation of the unfettered market economy and individualism'. This may be an over-statement; whatever McConnell's intentions, it is not difficult to imagine similar rhetorical flourishes from London government ministers. In terms of deeds, Stewart singles out student fees as the best publicised Scottish divergence from the London government's policy in education, but suggests that the Scottish Executive's continued commitment to comprehensive schools will prove more important in the longer term (if he had been writing a little later, he might also have mentioned its opposition to 'city academies'). Similarly, in health policy he notes that free social care for the elderly is the best known case of policy divergence, but identifies opposition to foundation hospitals as the most important example, because it symbolises a thorough-going resistance toNewLabour'modernisation' ofthehealth service. This is a work of social policy analysis, not of history. Although the author tells us (p. 69) that it 'is a fundamental premise of this volume that, to understand the present, 'we need knowledge of the past', his brief forays into history rarely go further back than 1979, and when they do it is by way of very general invocations of Scottish 'tradition', particularly in education. This is a pity, since it leaves unanswered some questions of central relevance to welfare policy, for example on the origins of the 'Glasgow effect', which receives several mentions, mostly in connection with the overall poor record of Scotland's health outcomes, but remains unexplained. The other major omission that arises from the lack of a deeper historical dimension to the study is an analysis of Scottish politics. Stewart really only addresses the distinct Labour and Liberal Democrat domination of the Scottish Parliament, and wonders how far a Conservative government in London would allow Scotland's welfare policies to diverge from its own; but even a brief discussion of political preferences in Scotland since 1945 would have helped to explain what Stewart sees as distinctively Scottish commitments to comprehensive education and a corporatist and consensual, rather than competitive, approach to health service provision. [End Page 150] The book, then, has what I regard as the virtues and vices of the tradition of social policy analysis to which it belongs. The virtues include clarity of exposition, a rigorous use of sources, and a commitment to empiricism. The vices include a suspicion or neglect of economic, social and political theory, and a consequent tendency to treat social policy as the product of reports, consultation papers, declarations of intent, committee minutes etc., viewed in abstraction from their social and political context. Stewart is of course aware that what matters...

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A presente tese de doutoramento carrega em seu bojo uma investigação sobre a formação inicial docente em Dança, especialmente, o estágio supervisionado obrigatório na licenciatura em Dança, com crianças pequenas da Educação Infantil. Parte do pressuposto de que meninas e meninos de pouca idade são capazes de construir saberes e sentidos às experiências, incorporando-as, decantando-as, no (re)conhecimento da alteridade da infância, em suas produções e expressões multilinguageiras, sensoriais, corpóreas e imaginativas, para uma formação de professoras/es em Dança, que as tenha como parceiras de aventuras lúdicas, rumo à curiosidade, ao inusitado, ao espanto, ao encantamento, à imaginação, à criação e à própria formação de estudantes e professoras/es. O interesse por tal tema emergiu de um exercício de autorreflexão acerca do percurso artístico, profissional e acadêmico, num processo que desvelou as relações entre as concepções de Educação, Dança, infância e Formação de professoras/es, na atuação como docente da Licenciatura em Dança, da Universidade Federal de Goiás (UFG), frente ao Estágio Curricular Obrigatório em Dança na Educação Infantil. Para isso, a produção de materiais para análise, ocorreu por meio do estado do conhecimento em Dança, Educação, Infância e Estágio, do acesso aos diários de campo de estudantes, em três diferentes experiências do estágio supervisionado com crianças matriculadas nos Centros Municipais de Educação Infantil (CMEIs), nos anos de 2017 e 2018, exploração de fotos e apresentação das minhas impressões sobre o processo, bem como reflexões a respeito da minha própria atuação como formadora. Dessa maneira, ao empregar um ponto de vista multirreferencial para o objetivo dessa tese, em diálogo com construtos teóricos que atravessam os campos da Arte, da Educação e dos estudos sociais da infância, como a Sociologia da infância, a Pedagogia da Educação Infantil e a Filosofia, assumiu-se um modo bricoleur de investigar, que se desenhou, ao longo do processo, como uma pesquisa-ação. As análises dos materiais produzidos evidenciaram a importância do (re)conhecimento e acolhimento do desconhecido, do devir e do caos que a atuação com as crianças pequenas revela. Assim, após acompanhar in loco e refletir sobre três processos estéticos, identifiquei que: 1) a tentativa de se avizinhar das distintas lógicas e expressividades das crianças pequenas; 2) acessar suas brincadeiras e construções lúdicas; e 3) observar e escutar seus gestos e movimentos. podem se tornar o centro do processo criativo e formativo das/os estudantes e docentes, na elaboração de propostas dançantes que necessitavam envolver tempos, espaços, sensorialidades e materialidades diversificadas e flexíveis para a Educação Infantil. Uma formação inicial, e por que não, continuada e permanente, que adota concepções brincalhonas, imaginativas, infancializantes, dialógicas, integrativas, horizontais, autorais, decolonizadoras e transmutadoras, ao fomentar a emancipação, a autonomia, a investigação, a criação, os modos diversos de se apropriar, transformar e revigorar o saber mediado na Universidade, ao ambiente educativo infantil e as experiências artísticas de movimento. Um estágio que esteja mais próximo da escola, não só das/dos estudantes da graduação, mas as/os próprias/os docentes universitária/o e todo o curso de graduação, para uma formação de docentes que exerçam sua poética da docência em Dança que, ao ensinar também aprendam, desaprendam e reaprendam, constantemente, ao longo do fazer artístico pedagógico, inventando e reinventando criativamente sua docência.

1. Epidemiology of Child Maltreatment 2. Informing Child Welfare: The Promise and Limits of Empirical Research 3. Providing More Effective, Ethical Services: The Philosophy and Process of Evidence-Based Practice 4. How Do We Know What Works?: The Quality of Published Reviews of Evidence-Based Practice 5. The Influence of an Adoption Experiment on Social Policy 6. New Permanency Strategies for Children in Foster Care 7. The Transition to Adulthood Among Youth Aging Out of Care: What Have We Learned? 8. Moving Restorative Justice Interventions into Domestic Violence Treatment 9. A Descriptive Study of Intimate Partner Violence and Child Maltreatment: Implications for Child Welfare Policy 10. Decision Making in Child Welfare: Constraints and Potentials 11. Lessons from Research on Decision-Making 12. Assessing Risk Throughout the Life of a Child Welfare Case 13. Improving Social Work Through the Use of Technology and Advanced Research Methods 14. The Future of Child Protection Revisited 15. The Implementation of Market-Based Child Welfare Innovations 16. Self-Evaluation: Using Data to Guide Policy and Practice in Public Child Welfare Agencies 17. Comparing Welfare and Child Welfare Populations: An Argument for Rethinking the Safety Net 18. Promoting Child Well-Being through Early Intervention: Findings from the Chicago Longitudinal Study 19. Heeding Horton: Transcending the Public Welfare Paradigm 20. Accounts at Birth: Creating a National System for Savings and Asset Building with Children's Savings Accounts 21. Beyond Child Welfare: International Perspectives on Child and Family Policies 22. The Effect of Children on the Income Status of Female-headed Households: An Intercountry Comparison

442 Children, Youth and Environments Vol. 21 No. 2 (Winter 2011) ISSN: 1546-2250 Imagined Orphans – Poor Families, Child Welfare, and Contested Citizenship in London Murdoch, Lydia (2006). New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press; 252 pages. $44.95. ISBN 9780813537221. As Victorian studies scholars are aware, the century between the early 1800s and the early 1900s was fraught with massive social, political, economic and geographic changes. In her academic treatise, Imagined Orphans, Lydia Murdoch examines a topic that touches on many of those issues. Her account of the underlying story of child welfare in 19th century London is a fascinating look at the complex array of societal issues that were at play during the Industrial Era. Murdoch, an historian on the faculty of Vassar College, writes of the various events and trends in child welfare by conducting a narrative and visual analysis of a wide-range of sources, both primary and secondary. She examines photographs, advocacy pamphlets, flyers, books, legislation, writings of child welfare activists, accounts of children who utilized the “poor law” system and philanthropic institutions, and accounts of parents of children who utilized those systems. The stories told by these sources help illuminate some of the history of our modern institutions of child welfare and protection. They also peel away many of the layers of mythology surrounding the experiences of poor children in London during the 19th century. According to Murdoch’s research, the commonly held belief that poor urban children in 19th century London’s child welfare systems were almost always orphaned or abandoned is inaccurate in many cases and purely fictional in others. She unearths examples of situations that were misrepresented by child welfare providers and activists, as well as examples of children who were presented as orphaned, when in actuality their parents had placed them in the poor law or philanthropic systems as a means of obtaining social 443 service aid when they most needed it. However, while Murdoch’s introduction to the text suggests that this is the main point of her findings, I would argue that the book is broader than that. Only two of the book’s six chapters directly deal with the issue of parental agency in the child welfare systems of Victorian London. In those two chapters, Murdoch makes a fine case for her argument that contrary to the mythologized views of London’s poor children being orphans and waifs with no adult guidance, parents and other guardians were actually very involved in their children’s welfare. Parents turned to the child welfare systems, both the government-controlled poor law system and private philanthropic organizations, in times of great economic and family hardship. However, this did not mean that they abandoned their offspring at the doors to the facilities. There is ample historic documentation to show that many parents remained active in their children’s lives and welfare even after the children were admitted to residential facilities for child welfare; this documentation gives a much fuller picture of the lives of the urban poor in London at that time. Beyond this, Murdoch’s main thesis, are four additional chapters that provide a chronicle of how the child welfare practices and discourse related to the larger issues of class, citizenship, religion, and gender. In the course of the book we learn that: the Victorian penchant for melodrama in literature leaked into the way poor children were portrayed by philanthropists and others working with them; the burgeoning middle-class values and expectations significantly impacted ideas about the appropriate physical environments for raising children and housing them in institutions; the trends in women’s rights included movements to give women more control over the nation’s child welfare system and practices; religion impacted the structure of philanthropic child welfare facilities; and training for citizenship and employment became a central driving force in the programming of child welfare institutions. These various descriptions and interrelationships are key to what I feel is actually the central theme of the book: the genesis of modern Western child welfare practices. It is amply clear from Murdoch’s work how many of our modern practices and 444 difficulties developed, and where we still struggle with certain issues over...

The period of compulsory school attendance is a mentally very challenging period for children in foster care, which can be impacted by complex developmental trauma stemming from the child's experience in foster care with cumulative and chronic traumatic events in his/her biological family. These events have taken place over a long period of time in interpersonal relationships usually related to caregivers, in the form of abandonment of the child by the caregiver, changing caregivers, lack of safe space and necessary support for the child from the family and school, and/or deficiencies in the provision of coordinated health and social care for both the child and the foster parents. The paper presents research findings supported by a statistical analysis of health and school difficulties in children in foster care related to their school attendance. The purpose of the research was to support the quality and coordination of services of non-profit organizations providing social, health and educational services to foster families and their children during school attendance to support the school success and well-being of children. The study was implemented as part of a dissertation at the University of South Bohemia in České Budějovice in the Czech Republic on the topic of promotion of the health, social and psychological well-being of school-aged children in the context of their school and family environment. The authors carried out a questionnaire survey in the Czech Republic among a selected sample of respondents, who were foster parents of children aged 6 to 15 attending primary school in the Pardubice Region. In a total sample of 102 respondents, we identified two different groups. One group – 64 respondents with healthy children and another group – 38 respondents with children with health difficulties. The aim of the research was to compare the assessments of the intensity of school difficulties of children in foster care in groups of respondents with or without a child with health difficulties or mental illness in their foster care. The hypothesis of a difference in assessments of school difficulties in children with/without health difficulties was formulated and statistically tested (H0: ratings of the intensity of difficulties are the same in both groups). Statistical testing of the hypothesis utilised the non-parametric Mann-Whitney test with the test results being significant at the level of significance p<0.05. Correlation was observed for each difficulty and exploratory cluster analysis shows their interrelationships. The study results according to the foster parents' assessment show a high intensity of difficulties of school-aged children in foster care in their inclusion in the classroom in establishing relationships with classmates (p-value =0.9), in a negative attitude towards learning and lack of motivation to learn (p-value =0.7) experiencing nervousness, internal tension and staying focused when learning. In addition, when comparing the groups of respondents with healthy children and children who have health difficulties/mental illness, there was a statistically significantly higher intensity of difficulties in the group of respondents with children with health difficulties when doing prep work for the classes (p-value =0.00075).