7. Mostly We Played with Whatever She Chose Deborah R. Major

The foyer of the former Catholic elementary school was totally deserted and eerily silent. The school had been converted to office space as private Catholic education became too expensive for immigrant families in the surrounding Chicago neighborhood. The absence of a receptionist or passing custodian seemed odd. I had recently left a business career where customers were never left alone to hunt for their destination. At the same time, there was something soothing about the total silence; silence that brought attention to the sunlight playing through stained glass windows and that bid its own voiceless welcome. As I started to look for the stairwell to the office where I would interview for a job I did not want, a young boy who looked about five opened a door on my left and crossed the foyer. Because of the way we were positioned, I never saw his face. He walked across the room and began pushing against a large wooden door that must have been quite heavy because it did not want to give under his weight. He did not notice my presence, or if he did, he did not turn to ask for help. As I moved closer to help him, the door suddenly gave way, he slipped through, and it closed behind him. As far as I know, I never saw him again. And in that moment, I suddenly changed my mind and thought, “I have to work here.” I dropped my initial motive to “practice” interviewing and walked the three flights of stairs determined to find work in that place. I would normally second-guess an immediate and radical change of heart bubbling up right before such an important meeting. I certainly would not assume I should follow a directive perceived in that way. Ordinarily, I might have considered such a reversal to be some form of countertransference. But I have never second-guessed that particular change of heart: a wish to help that child push open an enormous, heavy wooden door.

So began my entrance, in 1992, into the world of social work practice in child welfare. That same year little Joseph Wallace, a two-year-old recently returned to the custody of his mother, was found hung from a closet door. At the time I knew nothing about Joseph Wallace, or his mother, and next to nothing about child welfare for that matter. I had not planned to work in child welfare after completing my M.S.W., and so I was quite surprised to hear myself asking to be given a job as a therapist for children in foster care during my first interview for a social work position.

One of my first clients was a six-year-old little girl, Tina, who came into the system together with two older sisters and two younger brothers—the stated reason: neglect (in this case inadequate supervision and homelessness). The case file indicated that the family wandered from place to place, and all of the children were out on the streets “helping” their mother in fights. Tina’s mother, whom she called Janice,¹ was described by staff as “strung-out” and “on the streets,” and the file documented a long history of investigations for allegations of abuse or neglect, most of which had been “indicated.” Since Tina’s entry into foster care, the caseworker was often unable to locate Janice to confirm visitation with her children or to offer other services.

Tina was referred for individual therapy to address a variety of behaviors her foster mother found disturbing and reprehensible, including frequent fighting, bedwetting, hyperactivity, and periodically attempting to insert a pencil or other small objects into her vagina. Tina was very quiet and tense during our sessions, and it was quite a while before she would say much of anything to me. Mostly we played with whatever she chose: green play dough kneaded tensely and forcefully with tiny but strong fingers, before she turned it into hamburgers for us to eat. She was sometimes unable to play until she straightened the entire room, repositioning items on every horizontal surface to face the direction she needed them to face. Or sometimes she would just want to stand at the sink washing, washing something—anything: toys, pencils, dolls, her hands. And she was always, always tight and tense. The tension in her hands and arms seemed all wrong for someone so young. She seemed not to be at home in her own body, as if bracing against any possible threat that might take her by surprise. I often found myself thinking, “No six-year-old should have to carry this kind of tension.”

Like many of the children with whom I worked, Tina suspected that she was partially responsible for the separation from her mother and her siblings. She had told somebody something about what had happened to her, which started a series of investigations, leading up to her removal. So she had a sneaking suspicion that if she kept her mouth shut (this time) that she just might stem the tide of damage done to her family. I wondered what her play might look like if she didn’t experience me as part-therapist/part-police. I was determined to alter her view of me—determined to help her relax, determined to help her shed the false assumptions of responsibility for her mother’s safety and her family’s destruction. In retrospect, she probably experienced me as tense and uptight in my determination as I experienced her in hers. Like Tina, it did not help that I had multiple masters to satisfy and that these masters had conflicting goals. Her foster mother did not seem terribly concerned about whether Tina relaxed. She just wanted her to behave and expected me to make that happen. Tina’s guardian ad litem² wanted to know who had done the dreadful deed that got the child inserting objects into her vagina. The guardian hoped that over time I might be able to unearth this information, the assumption being that if Tina’s mother had failed to protect her from a character who frequented the family’s space, this was yet another reason that it would not be safe to send her home. I wanted Tina to not be kicked out of her placement.

Of course everyone engaged in practice with children wants to protect them. And while it helps to know something about what a child has had to tolerate in her daily life, getting “the facts” may be less important than understanding what meaning the child constructed of what happened to her, and how she might have used that meaning to alter her identity (Saari, 1993, 2002). For children in foster care, much of the conscious meaning they articulate is connected to the separation from their family, and not to the facts surrounding events leading up to separation.

One day when Tina and I were standing at the sink together washing various and sundry toys, she said, “You give my foster mother all that money to take care of me. Why can’t you just give that money to my mother? My mother could take care of me if you would give her that money.” I remember thinking, “What an interesting idea. It has a very interesting logic.” She completely surprised me in her understanding of the inequity of a system that would pay a stranger to take care of her, when it would never consider paying her own mother to do so. At the time, I remember thinking that this level of cognitive sophistication around the way payments transfer “ought” to have helped her understand that even if the system could pay her mother, that unless Janice made an effort to address her addiction, Tina was not likely to be the beneficiary of that payment. I decided to say nothing about this, but took a floundering stab at explaining that her caseworker wanted to do what she could to help her mother, but her worker was also having a really hard time finding Janice.

In the few years that I worked with Tina she was moved to several different homes, each foster parent requesting her removal for behaviors that Tina and I could not manage to get under control. Each time she was moved the demand for better behavior was ratcheted up (as she grew older), and the foster parents’ views of good behavior seemed more and more out of reach. Of course, it was not clear to me that getting the behaviors under control was a priority for Tina. What she did make clear to me was that she wanted to go home to Janice and her sisters and brothers. Going home remained her top priority; however, this did not occur. Janice’s parental rights were eventually terminated due to noncompliance with her service plan. Tina continued to move from home to home.

The families that allowed me into their lives in the role of helper struggled with a staggering combination of environmental and personal concerns, all the while working to regain custody of their children. With few exceptions children also wanted to “go home,” to have what they imagined their friends and classmates had, a real sense of being grounded in a family that did not constantly shift, so that Mother’s Day and Christmas would build on traditions from prior Mother’s Days and prior Christmases. What these children got instead was the tradition of no tradition at all, where the mother on this Mother’s Day might bear no resemblance to last year’s mother, and the family this Christmas might bear no resemblance to that of last year’s Christmas. Such changes during crucial stages of childhood can have deleterious consequences, since we all need some degree of sameness and predictability (both inside and outside) to develop a stable sense of who we are in the world (Nelson, 1985, 1989; Saari, 2002; Sroufe et al., 2005).

Within this context of face-to-face practice with children in foster care, I stumbled into social construction without anyone ever uttering those words. Children in foster care live and breathe a social constructionesque reality in ways that would make most of our heads spin. Little girls and boys who lose foster placements against their will and find themselves placed into new families overnight are often asked to become entirely different little people in those new families. I remember being shocked over and over again to see little girls appear for their counseling sessions looking like completely different little people from one week to the next. And the new families expected change not only in the exterior appearance of the children, but in their insides as well. This sometimes worked to a particular child’s advantage, such as when a young boy was moved from a home where his foster parent told me she thought he was “possessed by the devil.” Fortunately, his next foster parent harbored no such ideas about him, which seemed to go quite a long way toward freeing him from an extremely negative set of ideas about who he was and who he could become.

Social constructionist ideas are particularly well suited to practice with families in the child welfare system because they emphasize the notion that meaning can only be understood in context. It is critical to adopt an approach that helps us as practitioners do this, since parents in the system are often judged as if they enjoyed every opportunity available to any middle-class family, but that they simply chose to decline these opportunities because they prefer lives mired in chaos, violence, or addiction.

I will never forget meeting a particular parent whose case file reported multiple indications of abuse and neglect. She was often late to her appointments and seemed lacking in motivation to engage, even though she said she wanted her children back. One day she brought me a Polaroid photograph of the apartment she was renting. It showed exposed electrical wires with bare light bulbs and exposed two-by-fours through holes in the ceiling. For weeks her legs were covered with fleabites from flea-infested alley cats that entered the building hallways seeking shelter. She talked about how, as a child, the police recognized her family members’ voices immediately by telephone, so often were they called to come in and break up violent disputes between her parents. She described her experience of her mother’s hatred, on one occasion waking up during the night to find her mother standing over her with a raised frying pan. In the context of so much familial and societal desecration of her personhood, I began to marvel that she was willing or able to show up at all. I began to ask myself, what kind of parent might I have become in the face of this kind of constant chaos and degradation? I also began to recognize and appreciate her constant exhaustion for what it was, as opposed to the “resistance” that it had initially appeared to be. Taking this parent’s social world into consideration required that I suspend some of my assumptions about how the world operates. Social constructionist ideas helped sensitize me to the importance of parents’ and children’s meaning structures, and their voices and stories. As I learned to listen in a new way, I began to see new possibilities for aligning with her and with other clients that I had previously overlooked.

For instance, I was helped to see and hear why a child might experience subjective distress living in a home that is safer by some objective standards, without viewing this as a maladaptive defense. The child may only recognize himself in his family of origin. This understanding does not inform us with regard to safety recommendations, but these ideas help to make sense of the child’s personal feelings about what constitutes subjective safety. These children struggle to live with a foot in two worlds, to manage dual identities, and are asked to do so without causing their caregivers or themselves major headaches, an astounding demand given what we know about the stresses of trying to effectively bridge dissimilar cultures (Chestang, 1972; Furman, 2005; McClain, 1986; Wallerstein, 1987).

I think that most of us in the field did not truly comprehend what we were asking of children in these situations. There is a great deal of literature focused on children in foster care and their behavior problems and what a trial it is for substitute caregivers trying to take care of them (Barber and Delfabbro, 2004; Buehler, Cox, and Cuddeback, 2003; Cox, Orme, and Rhodes, 2002, 2003; Newton et al., 2000; Smith, et al., 2001). And of course it is very challenging, especially when children are so confused, frightened, angry, or dissociated that they cannot communicate coherently what it means to them to be separated from their families. We do not seem to fully understand what a trial it is for a child to reconstruct herself as a member of a new family while holding on to a vestige of herself as a member of her first family. Consider, for example, that foster children referred to counseling for fighting, bedwetting, hyperactivity, depression, and other painful symptoms often end up with treatment plans focused on reducing the frequency of tears shed, pants wet, punches thrown, swear words hurled, with little, if any attention paid to the subjective experience giving rise to the behaviors, and the difficulty of being required to reconstruct themselves as members of two (or more) dissimilar families, none of which may offer a permanent home. And while it does matter how people behave in communities, the focus on behavior modification in some settings can feel dismissing when it essentially disregards the part of the child that helps her know herself (e.g., it disregards the child’s motives and meaning structures). It may not be crucial in all settings to focus on subjective meaning making, but in child welfare settings this seems a very important part of human functioning to ignore. In fact, it seems akin to professional neglect.

In most cases, even when children had not been safe at home, they still loved their parents (most often mothers), and they just wanted parents to do whatever needed to be done to end the separation. In most cases, children were not focused on whatever incidents triggered the investigation. They were focused on the separation and all of their pain around that. They understood who they were as members of their first family, while they struggled to understand who they were in their foster families. This is not to suggest that we ought to base our decisions on children’s understandings, but rather to notice that children prioritize very differently compared to adults, and we must learn to understand how children make meaning, because that is where we ought to do our work with them (Saari, 1991). Of course, the same is true for their parents.

From this perspective, “in the trenches” social constructionist ideas seemed a more suitable framework for thinking about how to work in the system on behalf of children and their families. By highlighting individuals’ subjective views of their world, this perspective invited me to look for ways to “get inside” a child’s or parent’s view to develop a deeper and more accurate perspective of how relationships operated for them. I was also invited to understand the particular conditions under which the relationships evolved, in all their social complexity (Saleebey, 1993). This perspective required that I suspend some of my own taken-for-granted, middle-class assumptions about how the world works, and that I reexamine and analyze my personal viewpoints as part of the process. Most importantly, I was invited to consider my role in helping relationships as part of the evaluation process. By incorporating a social constructionist perspective, it became increasingly important to examine the lens through which I viewed my clients, to look at my lens while concurrently looking through it, as a way to reflect on the impact of my actions (Millstein, 1993). Drawing myself inside the system under evaluation helped to subject my own values, biases, and assumptions to a higher degree of scrutiny than I might otherwise have done (Tyson, 1995).

Using social constructionist ideas helped me recognize the bias inherent in the privileging of behavior and behavior modification, both for children and for their parents involved in the child welfare system. This is not to suggest that I ever came to see behavior as inconsequential—indeed, it is very important. However, the bias that privileges behavior change (or the appearance of change) presents enormous problems when it ignores relationship motives in favor of motor behaviors that we count. Children feel discounted and disrespected when we dive in to make them change their behavior without regard to the meanings that gave rise to it. This doesn’t necessarily mean that children want to explain it to you, or even that they can explain it. But they taught me that it does matter to them that I would want to understand, and it mattered that I would prioritize that knowledge above trying to make them change. The problem with this way of working, of course, is that people really want children to behave, and so in many settings behavior modification is king. Privileging behavior creates the expectation that treatment goals and objectives will be documented in behavioral terms, and that progress or lack thereof will be tracked in behavioral terms. Paradoxically, this focus on behavior often feels dehumanizing to children who struggle with self-regulation, while adults in authority often see this focus as a significant civilizer. For this reason, when working with children, I would often go out of my way to let them know that while their behavior mattered, I would first be interested in hearing what they wanted to tell me and how they understood and felt about what was going on in their lives. Often I could only make sense of their behavior by hearing their side of a story.

For the first couple of years after the death of Joseph Wallace, there was little discussion about sending children home. Since these years were formative in my training in child welfare, they led me to believe that if children were removed, they likely would never be returned. It took a while to recognize that after any high-profile death every worker on the frontlines with these families is shell-shocked and gun shy, and that all policies, from federal laws to agency policies, are interpreted through a lens of apprehension and heightened caution.

In some states, reliance on a rehabilitative service plan and its successful completion as the barometer of a parent’s readiness to regain custody of children is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, we must establish some benchmark as a way to assess parents’ understanding of what went wrong and how they might take action to prevent the reoccurrence of events resulting in their children’s removal. However, the constellation of factors contributing to family separation is usually multidetermined and so complex that putting a service plan in place that operationalizes required behavior changes, without regard for the wider context that gave rise to the problems in the first place, is reductionistic and a bit like plugging a dike with a wad of bubble gum.

Trust in rehabilitative service plans rests on the assurance that if we can successfully modify parents’ behavior via completion of a number of services (parenting classes, drug treatment, anger management, individual or family therapy, etc.), that children will be safer in their care. Parents “get” these messages and come “to treatment” saying, “I just have to complete these services, and then I can get my kids back. How many times do we have to meet?” Caseworkers, children’s guardians, public defenders, and judges all tend to get swept up in the service countdown. Everyone wants to place their faith in those aspects of the process that they can see, touch, and count: number of classes attended, certificates received, services completed. Court systems, which are focused on parental accountability and responsibility, prefer to see changes in black and white, and so behaviors and behavior change at the individual level becomes the default unit of analysis. The same is often true for children in the system. Most foster children are referred for behavior problems of one sort or another. In my experience, only rarely were children referred for depression, anxiety, or for some experience of subjective distress where these children were creating more problems for themselves than for those in the environment. Those kinds of difficulties were often not noticed.

In addition to detracting from a deeper understanding of parents’ caregiving motives, this reductionistic focus on their behavior often serves to detract from a clear and much needed examination of the social environment, the surrounding community, and whether the community has within it the support systems, resources, and services that will help shore up the parents’ caregiving motives, or instead harbors forces that will conspire to obstruct them. So materialist, reductionist ways of working with parents and children most often detract us from looking both deeper inward to see who the person truly is, and also detract us from looking outward to the larger context, and we need to look both deeper and wider in our work with children and their families.

So how might a social constructionist-informed approach open up a social worker’s ideas and shape a practice? It may be more challenging to consider what this would look like in work with parents where children have been seriously injured. While we know that there are no universally accepted definitions of abuse or neglect (Agathonos-Georgopoulou, 1992; Hong and Hong, 1991; Korbin and Spilsbury, 1999), when children have been injured most of us are inclined to agree that it becomes quite difficult to see certain kinds of injuries as social constructions. In working with a parent who has been accused of inflicting a potentially fatal injury, as for example, a subdural hematoma, is there any possible way to see what happened through the eyes of the parent? Is there a way to “work with” the parent’s understanding of the incident and still help the family create and sustain adequate safety for children? And even more risky, is it possible to work with “nonadmitting” parents—parents who deny having caused the injury?

Child welfare cases where parents are believed to have caused children’s injuries, but will not admit to having done so, are very difficult to work with and to resolve satisfactorily. In cases involving serious injuries, when parents cannot offer coherent explanations for how children were injured, the process of regaining custody can be stalled right at the outset. Every case involves working with the parent’s version of what took place, which can be at odds with the case document filed by the investigator. But there are comparatively few cases where parents claim to have no real understanding about the injury.

One advantage of taking a social constructionist approach is that it gives temporary permission to set aside the official document and hear first from the parent how they saw events unfold, which can lend some legitimacy to an alternative viewpoint. When parents know that you are sincere in wanting to hear their side of the story, this stance often helps to develop a working relationship. However, parents need to know that while you are sincerely interested in their view, significant differences between their version and what is contained in the file may become a serious roadblock in court. To help engage the process of radical listening,³ I would sometimes intentionally avoid reading the case file until after I had met the parent. Doing so helped me to suspend judgment and to give parents the benefit of the doubt. It was always interesting to notice how much more difficult it was to believe parents if I already had the official version in mind. It was also interesting to notice differences in my body when I was able to stay open as compared to when I was second-guessing much of what they had to say.

In this case, I did not have the opportunity to hear from the parents first. I had been briefed at a staffing and asked to serve as therapist for the mother of an infant who had suffered a potentially fatal head injury at three months of age. The parents were quite young, recently married, and parenting their first child, who had been born premature and had spent the first few weeks following birth in the hospital. Both parents insisted that they had done nothing to injure their baby. Interviewed separately by the investigator, they told basically the same story about how the child could possibly have been injured. During the staffing, the caseworker and supervisor referring the parents pointed to multiple “red flags,” including medical records documenting that the injury could not have been accidental. By the time I met Beth (the baby’s mother), I had read the entire case file, and I had been fully updated about the child’s current condition (now a year after the incident), the current placement, and the parents’ attitudes about the situation in which they found themselves. Frank, a social work colleague, had been assigned to work with Beth’s husband, Tim.

Because of the way this case was transferred to the department, there was considerable suspicion from the outset that these parents were colluding to protect each other. Physicians on the child protection team insisted that the only way this particular constellation of injuries could occur was child abuse; it could not have been an accident. This information was relayed to me before I ever set eyes on Beth. Frank and I began with two young parents who were angry and frightened, but who insisted that they had not caused their baby’s injury. When parents are referred under such circumstances, is there any good way to proceed?

As with all cases involving serious injury to children, I explained to Beth that her confidentiality was compromised from the outset. Parents are informed that in the interest of child protection, officers of the juvenile court must receive pertinent information regarding parents’ progress in treatment, without which there is no way to gage the parent’s readiness to resume a protective parenting role. This typically means anything that will clarify the parent’s ability to recognize and accept responsibility for the incidents that brought children into care, and what parents are willing to do to mitigate risks and increase protective factors. The first step focuses on the parent’s understanding and admitting their responsibility, in the absence of which parents may be stuck on first base.

It did not help that Beth told me in the first session that she would be willing to lie to get her child back and that she had other relatives who would also be willing to lie on her behalf. However, when Beth said she would be willing to lie, she meant lie and admit that she had hurt her baby, when in fact she insisted that she had not done so. In many ways, this case seemed doomed from the start: a child who had sustained life-threatening injuries that parents’ explanations did not explain; one parent saying she would be willing to lie if that was the only way to get her child back; physicians and investigators who believed the parents were already lying to cover themselves and prevent criminal charges. Where was the truth? And was the only path to progress to locate this truth first? I wondered if there was a way to move forward in the absence of knowing. Could I develop a therapeutic alliance with Beth, while all of these confounding factors swirled in the foreground? If such an alliance could be created, would that make any difference in the truths that emerged? What view would the guardian and the judge take of a decision to try and work with parents who continued to deny responsibility—parents referred to in case law as nonadmitting?

I could have taken an immovable stance with Beth, but if I did I knew that we would begin on an adversarial footing, and I could see that she was preparing herself for just such a relationship. From the very outset, Beth complained about her caseworker, about how she couldn’t trust her and wanted her case transferred to someone she could trust. On a process level, I heard her expressing her distrust of me as well. She complained about her own mother (her child’s relative foster parent), and how she resented the way her mother was caring for her child. I suspected that I had inadvertently joined a long line of women in authority with whom this young parent did battle, and by whom she felt unjustly accused and dismissed. I conferred with Frank, who had met with Beth’s husband, Tim, for an assessment, and who was convinced that Tim was totally innocent. Despite our lengthy discussions about this case, my colleague’s certainty made no sense to me. From my perspective there was uncertainty all around. But accepting uncertainty meant including the possibility that there just might be a way to work with the couple without insisting that they start by admitting guilt. I considered what might help my client to feel more at ease with the process. Beth seemed fearful and resentful that she and her husband were seen separately, and she felt that we had been intentionally attempting to encourage one of them to implicate the other. Frank felt that there was truly nothing more to be learned from seeing his client individually, and so despite the judge’s court order for individual work, we brought the couple together to see if we could co-create a new dynamic that would help to get the case “unstuck.”

There was a significant shift in the dynamic when we brought the parents together. Beth appeared to feel much more at ease than she had been when alone with me. Frank and I checked in with them about this, and Beth admitted, somewhat apologetically, that she did not feel that I was always hearing her side of things. I was relieved at her openness, thanked her for telling me, and confirmed that it was really good that she could share this with me, and that the more she could let me know when she felt that I was failing to stay with her would really help. During this session, Beth also began to talk about her life in a way that she had not done before. She spoke at length about her frustration and feelings of isolation as she tried to care for her baby alone while Tim was at work. She admitted that she had had to give herself “time-outs” from caring for Chris when she would cry inconsolably and there was no one around to help. So in this first session of bringing Beth into the room with her husband, the nature of her talk shifted such that she was more open about the losses she experienced in trying to care for her child alone.

After reviewing my initial counseling assessment, the state’s attorney called to ask if I were operating under the premise that the parents “did it” or “didn’t do it,” and that if the parents had stipulated to the facts that the injuries were caused by abuse, then why had I failed to create a treatment goal of having the parents accept responsibility for having caused the injuries; and if this was not currently a goal of treatment, then when would this become a treatment goal? The state’s attorney also asked if I were working from the premise that the adjudication order was accurate, then what evidence existed that the parents were making any progress as documented in my initial assessment? The state’s attorney seemed convinced that I was biased in favor of the parents, and that my biases were clearly getting in the way of seeing the facts.

When Beth read my initial counseling assessment, she was furious because it did not say what she thought it should say, and she told me angrily that she did not think people without children should be allowed to work with parents since they could not possibly understand anything about having a child! She was very frustrated that the case was not moving forward, and she was sure that I was standing in the way by what I had written. Beth was also angry with her mother for saying certain things to me about the way she parented during the visits, even though she had asked me to call and talk with her mother prior to the court date.

After the first court date, Frank and I explained to Beth and Tim that the court was not satisfied that they fully recognized the risks to their child’s safety; nor had they taken sufficient steps to address these risks. We saw the wedge as the focus on the balance of risk and protective factors, and if the parents could demonstrate that they recognized the risks, the part they played, and most importantly their role in identifying protective factors and garnering sufficient supports to put protective factors in place, then perhaps there would be a way to balance working with the parents while also assuring the court that their child could be protected going forward.

In a collaborative effort, we asked the couple to partner with us to flesh out the risks to their baby’s safety and to consider carefully every offsetting protective factor they could possibly bring to bear to mitigate these risks. When they bristled at the court’s assessment of risk, we invited them to do their own research on risk factors for child endangerment. Beth and Tim had never done such research, and they were quite eager to check behind us, hoping to demonstrate how the pediatric child protection team, the court, and Frank and I were all overreacting, since they were focused on their child’s current state of significantly improved health. When they objected to our suggestions of what we thought would help their case, we gave them the freedom to come up with their own ideas about what they were willing to do to address any risks they could identify (DeJong and Kim Berg, 2001). We repeatedly invited them to present their perspective and to tell us what was important to them, and we spent a considerable amount of time listening and affirming their perspective, although we could not always agree with them.

When Beth and Tim did their own research on risk factors for child abuse, they were able to take a step back and see things from more than one perspective, and they admitted that there were indeed gaps in their ability to protect their baby. With this knowledge, Beth began to see that the purpose of identifying these gaps was to close them and not to blame her for them. We invited them to come up with any ideas they were willing to consider to close these gaps, and we offered to join them in brainstorming and to have them say what they thought of our ideas.

The process of coming to a meeting of minds around treatment goals began with helping Tim and Beth to discuss openly what they noticed as they conducted their own research (DeJong and Kim Berg, 2001). They noticed a number of factors that made it more likely that others would see risk, rather than the view of themselves they thought they were portraying: Beth revealed her own childhood history of abuse and neglect and a brief period of being in foster care. They discovered additional factors, such as their social isolation, lack of knowledge about child development, and risks that often accompany premature birth that are often considered potential risks to their baby’s safety. Beth also disclosed frustration with Tim for failing to understand what she was going through at home alone, as well as frustration with her mother for judging her. She admitted that her frustration had made it difficult to attend to Chris when they had first brought her home from the hospital, and that the first few weeks of being separated from her had affected her ability to bond, and now she felt frustrated that everyone was putting all the blame on her. As Beth heard us convey that her frustration was completely understandable, she began to experience us less as adversaries.

Once the shift occurred where they no longer felt judged, Beth and Tim began to consider steps they were willing to take to address several risk factors that they could see operating in their lives, including their lack of knowledge about child development, a parent-child bond that was not as strong as they had hoped it would be, a general sense of isolation from social support systems, and a negative relationship with the relative caregiver, Beth’s mother. They also became more amenable to considering other ideas that would demonstrate their commitment to their child’s safety and healthy development. For example, we discussed the importance of developing a stronger bond with Chris, which would mean visiting her more often, even if that meant visiting individually, something Beth had firmly objected to early on. We asked them to consider what it would mean for the relationship with Chris if at least one of them visited frequently by comparison to having both of them visit together infrequently. They were able to recognize that infrequent contact with Chris would compromise her ability to develop a strong attachment to them, and they both said that they wanted to strengthen the attachment. They also recognized the importance of gaining more knowledge of child development, particularly about toddlers, since Chris was nearing her second birthday and was already having difficult tantrums during their visits. Frank and I had some concerns about their lack of understanding of this important developmental stage. We suggested that they do some reading about early child development and that they try journaling about how they responded to Chris during their visits, reflecting on her needs and development, as well as their feelings about the relationship with her. They responded by saying that they did not like the book Frank suggested and that they would look for their own material. They did agree to try journaling when they had visits.

After these discussions, we were able to agree on several treatment goals that included strengthening the parent/child bond, increasing their understanding of Chris’s behavior and child development, and decreasing Beth’s isolation by increasing her social support systems. Beth also began to be more aware of her reactions to stress and how she responded to everyone when she was angry. Some of this she identified as related to stressors in her family of origin, since her mother was Chris’s primary caregiver and stressors in the relationship with her mother impacted the quality of visitation, as well as her motive to visit in the first place. Once Beth noticed how interrelated these concerns were, she saw the benefit of addressing the stressors in her relationship with her mother and her own tendency to become very angry when stressed. These seemed to be goals that Beth felt supported her personally, but they also supported an improved relationship with Chris and with her mother. In the co-construction of treatment goals, Beth began to recognize that Frank and I were invested in her progress and in favor of supporting the possibility to regain custody, as long as she and Tim could address the risks and follow through on strengthening protective factors.

There were several signs of progress developing as we continued to meet over the next few months, among them that Beth was more engaged in the counseling sessions and began to relate to Frank and I more as allies who could think with her about whether she was responding during visits with Chris the way she intended. As a result, she grew increasingly open about how she handled many things with her child and offered her own views about disciplinary techniques, such as how she felt about the use of “time-out.” As Beth began to be more open, she could see that the space was there for her to reflect on her own motives and for her to be listened to without judgment. This awareness of the relational space, combined with the experience of being heard, seemed to bring about a positive shift in the direction of fewer angry reactions and more reflection.

I compared this increased ability to reflect to earlier reactions when Beth bristled and became very angry with us about the judge’s refusal to grant unsupervised visitation. Initially, whenever she received news that she did not want to hear, she would respond angrily with, “This is dumb!” followed by shutting down, and turning her face away in a scowl. In the face of these disappointments, she at first had a tendency to interpret what she heard in a negative way. For example, when the judge refused to grant unsupervised visits, she assumed that Frank and I had written something or said something to the judge to bring about this ruling. This experience of loss tended to be followed by reactions akin to paranoia, and on more than one occasion Beth called her husband at the office to tell him that I had said she would never get Chris back. She spent a day or two thinking that I was covertly working to undermine her. It sometimes took an intervention from Tim to convince her that her impression was unwarranted. But as Beth began to make progress, her responses to loss began to shift in perceptible ways, as for example, when she received disappointing news from the court, she was able to be more reflective about the meaning of that news and did not automatically assume that anyone was out to get her. So by contrast with her initial responses to disappointments from the court, as she progressed, when the judge denied the unsupervised visitation that she and Tim had hoped for, she was able to see that the concern was for Chris’s safety.

Another important sign of progress was that Beth started to show a deeper investment in her relationship with Chris, as evidenced by an increased willingness to visit her child alone and of her own accord. Whereas initially she had refused to visit Chris without her husband, after agreeing on the centrality of improving the bond with her, she began to visit Chris weekly and stayed longer, even if Tim had to work. Also, the tenor of her discussion about these visits changed markedly. Whereas initially these discussions sounded very flat and perfunctory, over time Beth began to speak in an animated and joyful way about the pleasure of being with her child. She began to think much more about things from Chris’s point of view and about the impact of her choices, as for example, her use of “time-out,” which she began to find distressing as she identified more with her child’s feelings. When Chris would cry about being placed in time-out, Beth began to wonder if Chris was thinking that she wanted to create that distance between them and if that motive of intentionally creating distance hurt Chris even more than the actual punishment. As she visited her more often, Beth began to think more and more about her child’s feelings and perspectives on what they did together.

Over time, Beth’s response to a variety of losses noticably shifted in the direction of increased reflection and a willingness to consider what was happening, without automatically responding as if the unwanted event was a personal criticism. Gradually, Frank and I noticed that when Beth experienced a loss she would try to listen and understand why something was being said about her. A notable example was her response to unflattering comments made about her in a bonding assessment performed by an outside examiner. Rather than becoming defensive, she expressed curiosity about what she had said that could have conveyed this impression. Compared to her responses ten months earlier, this availability to consider others’ opinions represented significant progress. It appeared that this shift was in part the result of a relational process, whereby Beth had the experience of being cared for in a way that was gratifying to her and that represented a departure from earlier relationship experiences where she felt routinely demeaned or dismissed. The relationship process appeared to strengthen her motives to care for herself, such that Beth could recognize her prior shutting down as not offering the kind of protection she used to believe it offered, and she could then recognize that staying open to hear what people had to say would result in a more satisfying outcome for her and for her entire family. Some treatment models might describe this kind of change as demonstrating improved coping skills and better reality testing.

Beth also began to invest more initiative in her own progress by addressing other goals we had agreed upon as important to her parenting. To address her social isolation, she decided to reach out to another young parent in her neighborhood, forming a supportive friendship, and she located a parent support group near her home. She also became more aware of a relationship dynamic in her family of origin that had previously felt quite normal, but that she now wanted to change because she started to experience it as toxic. She described the dynamic as one where family members engaged in excessive verbal criticism, followed by “tuning out” in a way that “silenced” the critical person. When asked, Beth explained that this way of relating had been the norm in her family for “decades,” as she recalled her grandparents and her mother interacting this way when she was a young child. She began to wonder if this old dynamic might be part of the reason her mother criticized her parenting so much. In addition, Beth began to notice that this was not just a dynamic that she fell victim to, but it was also a tactic that she used with other family members, again showing more openness and increased self-awareness. As her trust of the counseling process increased, Beth also began to be more open about the impact of such problematic communication patterns on the quality of her marriage with Tim, and also on their parenting. She noticed and talked openly about how she and Tim also engaged in this “tuning out” tactic to avoid addressing painful topics.

At ten months, it appeared that Beth experienced the counseling process as a legitimate source of personal and family support, and that she recognized the importance of having support as a way to strengthen the important relationships in her life and to shore up her parenting ideals. In general, I noticed less defensiveness and more openness to a range of opinions and perspectives from others, but also more tolerance and openness to her own internal processes, feelings, thoughts, and awareness of responses to others. These changes could be felt in the way the dialogue changed between us and also in the way that the dialogue changed between Beth and Tim during the counseling sessions. Early on in the process, Beth was often angry and distancing; she often closed down or backed away in a huff. She talked about her suspicion of people without children and how she didn’t think they could be trusted. She talked about how she wanted a change in caseworkers (indirectly referring to the treatment relationship as well). But at the ten-month period Beth showed much stronger motives to stay engaged even during difficult times. She talked about good moments and difficult moments she had with her child and with her husband. She smiled and giggled when she was pleased. She asked for advice or input about things that were important to her. And when she felt upset or frustrated, she shared those feelings without suggesting that it was someone else’s fault that she was feeling them. Over time being with her felt more like a dance we were all engaged in, and much less like walking on eggshells, as it had in the beginning.

Twelve months after our initial meeting, many differences seemed evident including a significant increase in Beth’s desire to be both physically and emotionally available to her child; an increase in empathy for her child, particularly when she felt hurt or upset; a desire to use Chris’s motives for care and comfort as the regulating guide for her caregiving responses; and an increased awareness of the parent/child bond and the painfulness of being apart. Other significant differences included Beth’s motive to seek help with marital conflicts, as evidenced by a desire to talk openly about communication problems she and Tim experienced during disagreements. She voluntarily asked for help with their tendency to shut down and then later blow up and distance themselves from each other, because she believed that their relationship would be stronger if they could change this dynamic. In seeking help with these communication problems, Beth said she now believed that asking for help was not a sign of personal deficiency and that being able to do so improved their parenting and interpersonal communication. She reported that they were better able to “hang in there” with each other and talk through difficult issues in less defensive ways, and were much less likely to walk away and tune each other out. She also expressed a wish to be able to communicate in a more conflict-free way with her mother, and she asked if we could help her improve that relationship as well.

Shortly after their twelve-month progress report, Beth and Tim asked to have the service transferred to a location closer to her mother’s home so that visiting Chris would not involve such a long commute. They also asked if we could intervene to have her mother participate, as they recognized that Beth’s mother continued to treat her as if she were still the rebellious teen she had once been. She identified wanting to have a better relationship with her mother as important and thought it would be important to have some help addressing some longstanding negative relationship patterns with her mother.

At this point, Frank and I invited Beth and Tim to review the work we had done together, to identify how they felt they had been helped, or what they thought was different from when we began. As usual, Beth did most of the talking. In evaluating the service, Beth said she thought they were both more open now to admitting when they needed help, and they were better at asking for help and not feeling that asking meant that they were bad parents. They had come to believe that asking for help actually enabled them to be better parents. Beth also said they were better at addressing issues between the two of them and admitting that they needed to work on their relationship, which they had never done. Prior to treatment they would simply not talk and then would periodically blow up at each other, and that had greatly decreased. They noticed that they had not had any big fights in a long time. They both said that they had learned more about how to take care of Chris and how to handle her tantrums without getting into big power struggles. Beth said she thought that they had learned a lot about risks for abuse and that they had addressed most of the risks for abuse and neglect. She giggled as she said they believe that they worked on all the treatment goals, sometimes without really meaning to. They agreed that they hated being told what to do, and they felt that what we had said at first was dumb, but they now saw that it really wasn’t dumb and that it had actually helped them. Beth also talked about how she used to get really mad and just shut down, and now she was able to listen to criticism more without getting as mad as she had before. They both seemed pleased to reflect on their progress and what they had accomplished over the year of working together.

In work with parents whose children have been removed, officers of the court tend to be skeptical when treatment providers take an approach that deviates from a legal understanding of what constitutes successful resolution of the situation that brought children into care. Judges and guardians want to hear testimony from treatment providers about the parents’ understanding of problems that led to the separation, and most importantly they want to hear that parents’ have clearly accepted responsibility for what went wrong. They insist on having evidence that the original conditions have been thoroughly “addressed” in the treatment, that parents recognize and are prepared to prevent any further risks, and that they have built in sufficient protective factors to ensure children’s safety.

Judges may not think about case resolution in black and white terms when off the bench, but official testimony does not welcome shades of gray. This is understandable given that children’s safety is on the line, and no one wants children to sustain further injury after returning them to their families. It is also important to keep in mind that judges and guardians hear similar cases for months (sometimes years) on end, and the never-ending flood of abuse and neglect cases naturally affects how they see parents. So guardians tend to ask questions about parents and treatment progress in terms that may conflict with the way treatment has actually taken place, or with the way parents and treatment providers have been thinking about it. In addition, testimony has to be given in a kind of legal language, so treatment providers must have a clear understanding of the legal expectations and may need to translate the work that has been accomplished into language the court understands. This can feel subjectively discordant to parents and treatment providers, since it means taking a constructionist understanding of the case and sifting it through a different categorical, less forgiving lens. It is important to keep in mind that the legal system is intentionally adversarial and in the courtroom treatment providers advocating for parents may be viewed with skepticism or even demeaned unless they are skilled in speaking about the case in legal terms. Further, it is impossible to remove all elements of risk given that most parents in the system are very poor and live in poor (and sometimes crime-ridden) communities that carry significant risks for all residents. And while this is obvious to service providers and to clients, explaining to the court that some risks will always be beyond the client’s control is not likely to be helpful since the legal system prefers that all possible risks be resolved.

With these tensions in mind, it is important to understand that what helps clients in the treatment setting and what may help them in court can be entirely different things, and workers must be prepared to respond differently according to the setting (Wood and Tully, 2006). In the case presented, and in most child welfare cases, there is an ongoing tension between agency clients and officers of the court who often disagree about the nature of the problem, the facts of the case, and what constitutes case resolution. The court environment and that of the family are very different worlds. The need to ensure that children will be protected means that there will continue to be court oversight, and this means that the court and its officers (the guardian, the state’s attorney, and the judge) are also service users and should be considered as such. Professional training means that legal officers generally rely on an adversarial process and a history of case law that they do not view as negotiable even as it shifts with the rulings on new cases. Most often they try cases in black or white: The parent is either guilty or innocent, in need of rehabilitation or not, and in the absence of a confession they are convinced that children will be at great risk. The parents’ experience is anything but black and white. Parents in the system are often navigating a confluence of very difficult waterways: insufficient financial resources, insufficient social support, unsafe neighborhoods, family histories of abuse, addiction, domestic violence, and sometimes their own addiction.

Child endangerment is rarely intentional, but is more likely when parents are negotiating these multiple streams with insufficient resources and insufficient supports. The demand on the worker is to understand the nature of these very different worlds and to find a way to navigate between them, to be conversant in both of them concurrently, to translate between them, and to try to find a way to enrich the parents’ social environment on multiple levels such that risks to children are decreased. Of course, the resources workers can garner on behalf of these families are rarely enough to satisfy their needs, and the time constraints allowed for case resolution generally demand early evidence of parents’ behavioral rehabilitation over and above enrichment of the parents’ social environment and economic situation. The expectation that parents will make rapid behavioral changes, in addition to reducing risk by improving neighborhood contexts or finding more and better resources within chronically impoverished neighborhoods, brings significant stressors into the treatment setting. Some parents become overwhelmed by the magnitude of expectations, and many give up trying.

Social constructionist ideas provide workers with a framework for viewing and understanding these colliding viewpoints and social realities without reifying any one of them, which is essential given that the juvenile court has substantially more power to determine the parents’ fate with regard to reunification. In the absence of a framework for assessing the relative merit of multiple viewpoints (and indeed the value of considering them concurrently), the tendency would be to espouse one specific frame for analyzing a case. Social workers come into the field of child welfare with very strong motivations to help, and so depending on one’s view of what constitutes help, one can easily be co-opted by the power inherent in the legal system to determine what constitutes legitimate child protection. But it is just as easy to be won over by a parent’s extreme vulnerability. One does not have to work in the field very long before it becomes painfully obvious that parents have often experienced difficult childhood histories of deprivation and loss similar in many ways to those undergone by their children. Sadly, some case files document multiple generations of the same family having spent time in foster care. It is imperative that workers recognize and understand multiple, colliding truths, those that lie within the judge’s frame of reference, within the parent’s, within our own, and whenever possible, within the child’s. These viewpoints are not likely to line up in a seamless way, and so it behooves us to step back and ask, “Given the multiplicity of perspectives, including a comprehensive assessment of risk, what constitutes good help in this particular situation?”

In the case presented here, my colleague and I believed it worth the risk to challenge the notion that child safety could not be achieved in the absence of parental confession. We could not know in advance what direction the parents would take, but over time we came to believe that their increased openness, decreased defensiveness, and personal choice to bring more history and more relational issues into the treatment space suggested that they were serious about improving the relationships across their lives, including their parenting. So our court documents continued to push this perspective. The ability to document the parents’ progress in the absence of a confession helped the judge to consider our viewpoints while concurrently listening to the guardian ad litem. Meanwhile, the child’s guardian objected consistently and unrelentingly to our recommendations, and the judge agreed with her right to the end and publicly admonished us for failing to determine whether the parents had “directly addressed the injuries” that brought Chris into care. The judge stated that he was not obligating the parents to admit guilt, but that he needed evidence that they accepted responsibility for their child’s injuries, and he did not see this evidence. Despite the parents’ refusal to admit responsibility for the initial injury, the judge granted the agency discretion to increase parental visitation, while continuing to express his displeasure about the shortcomings of our treatment choices. He insisted that he wanted the new therapists picking up the case to be clear about his imperative that these parents accept responsibility for the child’s injuries. The judge also emphasized that he wanted a return to individual counseling for both parents because the case had never been about communication between the parents. In this ruling, it is easy to see how the court discounted the impact of marital harmony and communication on the couple’s parenting and on their functioning as individuals.

This case is in no way intended to present a recipe or template for how to help parents who refuse to admit, nor should it be used as a template for how to assess risk, although my colleague and I were very intentionally assessing risk every time we met with this couple. There is an ever-growing body of literature addressing risk assessment in child welfare practice (Baird and Wagner, 2000; Baumann et al., 2005; English and Pecora, 1994; Gambrill and Shlonsky, 2001; Schwalbe, 2004, 2008; Shlonsky and Wagner, 2005). Indeed, the tension between camps preferring actuarial assessments and those preferring consensus-based or clinical assessments has mounted to the point where these debates are being conceptualized as war (Baumann et al., 2006; Johnson, 2006). All risk assessment concerns the attempt to identify situations where children are in danger and to determine the appropriate type of intervention. Actuarial instruments attempt to estimate the probability of future maltreatment at the point where Child Protective Services closes an investigation and must decide whether to open the case for additional services or close it altogether. And despite the mounting evidence on the efficacy of actuarial risk assessments, I think that we will never escape the necessity (and the risk) of using our informed judgments, in part because interpreting the meaning of complex situations is what social workers are inevitably called to do. This is because the processes and skills that breathe life into the principles we entered the profession to use demand some dialogic flexibility that allows us to pay very close attention and to respond to the unique needs and strengths each person brings. Is client empowerment a possibility if we close ourselves off to our own judgment?

While it is valuable to understand the risk debates, it is also important to avoid being consumed by them, because they tend to focus our attention narrowly on the relative merits of either method, and in so doing we are distracted from broader concerns. So for example, if we focus our attention on which method more accurately predicts future maltreatment or the likelihood that a report will be substantiated, are we not being distracted from assessing the neighborhood, community and cultural contexts, and how these contextual variables might support adaptive family processes or conspire to undermine them (Garbarino, 1995; Garbarino and Barry, 1997)? Do the risk assessment debates help us to ask the questions, “What do these parents (indeed all parents) need to take the best care of their children, and how can we help them to access these resources? How can we create the resources that poor families need to care for their children? How do we as social workers and as a society move from an environment where we are narrowly focused on child protection crises to one where we can address more broadly defined child welfare issues and the system’s goal of improved family and child well being?”

Nearly twenty years ago, my first social work supervisor said, “There is an endless stream of children coming into the system.” While there are fewer children in the child welfare system today than there were in 1992, there are still many factors operating that make his words seem tragically prophetic. State budget allocations for child welfare services far outstrip allocations for prevention programs. Neglect and abuse are strongly associated with family and neighborhood poverty, and the numbers of families living in poverty-stricken communities continue to rise (Dworsky et al., 2007; Gourdine, 2007). In large measure, we as a nation hold fast to a view of child abuse and neglect as problems that arise within individual families, and our interventions are primarily focused at the level of individuals, although we would likely make far more progress if we could convincingly recast this problem as a public health concern. Such a shift in thinking does not seem likely to happen in the near future.

The guiding objectives of the child welfare system are safety, permanency, and family and child well-being. To the extent that the system focuses on narrow definitions of child safety and permanency, and struggles to articulate and flesh out a meaningful understanding of family and child well-being, we are not likely to see real changes in how the system responds to children and families in need of assistance. Given the crisis-oriented state of the child welfare field and the adversarial nature of the legal system, it is likely that workers will continue to find themselves in situations similar to the one represented in Beth’s case. And since we know that foster care is by no means a panacea for the multiproblem situations that land children and families there, we need to look in many directions for possible ways to prevent children’s placement, and to ameliorate the family situation. This requires advocacy and action on multiple levels (individual, community, agency, and policy).

When we as social workers find ourselves working with individuals, one avenue will be honing the skills needed to engage involuntary parents in collaborative ways, including those who may initially resist discussions of how children were injured when signs suggest that parents may have played a role in their injuries. Social constructionist principles help engage parents who are mandated to treatment because its processes attempt to depathologize clients’ situations and to bring their voices and perspectives to the fore (DeJong and Kim Berg, 2001). These ideas remind us not to stand in the role of expert, to listen with a “not knowing” stance, and to question which stories receive credibility and which are institutionalized (Anderson, 1997). They also remind us to look to broader systems for their contributions to the problem and to the solutions, to look for client strengths and ways that the family has managed to survive, and to co-create interventions that will address the problems on multiple levels (Wood and Tully, 2006).

The current trend in the field of child welfare is to demand greater state accountability via the creation of national standards designed to assess states’ performances with regard to child protection and child welfare outcomes. States are expected to be in substantial conformity with these standards as evidenced by the degree to which they meet certain performance outcomes (Courtney et al., 2004). Conformity is determined by matching specific quantitative indicators of child safety and permanency (e.g., rates of maltreatment recurrence, the incidence of abuse or neglect in foster care, foster care entries and re-entries, length of time to reunification or adoption, and stability of foster placements). The data, submitted to automated reporting systems such as CFSR (Child and Family State Reviews), AFCARS (Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting Systems), NCANDS (National Child Abuse and Neglect Data Systems), and SACWIS (Statewide Automated Child Welfare Information Systems), focus on narrow indicators of child safety and permanency and, since it is collected at the program level, is often limited in its ability to tell us how children actually fare. For example, the demand to reduce the number of placements a child has could translate into workers feeling pressured to keep a child in a particular home even if the home is a poor fit. At the program level, the data represented by the stability of this placement looks like success, but tells us nothing about the viability of that foster relationship and how it contributes (or fails to contribute) to the well-being of the child or foster parent. Further, the demand that workers in the trenches spend more time documenting this information means they have less time to deliver services, which can lead to situations where workers know less about how children fare. As successfully meeting the national target indicators comes to be seen as good performance, the indicators themselves start to shape our understandings of child welfare in ways that may say little about the actual welfare of system clients. In other words, contrary to being objective barometers of good performance, they too are social constructions (Tilbury, 2004). This is not meant to say that the data are unimportant, but the data should not be accepted as the primary barometers for how the system is meeting its goals, particularly the goal of improving family and child well-being.

The demand for accountability is surely a good thing when it means evaluating child welfare practices on multiple levels to determine whether or not we are actually improving the lives of children and families. However, if the manner in which we do so leaves no space to consider the goal of family and child well-being more broadly defined, and if the data collection processes constrict the meanings we construct about the nature of child welfare practice such that it is reduced to a system surrounding mandated reporting, abuse investigations, and foster care, then we need to ask to what degree we have lost the ability to consider more broadly what child welfare practice could otherwise mean. If social workers employed in the field of child welfare were allowed to allocate some portion of their work week to thinking creatively about how to improve the welfare of children and families, perhaps the research about these workers would be about the intrinsic rewards of this work instead of the high levels of burnout and the constant struggle to retain skilled workers. Given more freedom to think with fewer restrictions about clients’ needs (in lieu of casework documentation demands), families might throw open their arms and greet us with enormous smiles when we identify ourselves as child welfare workers. If we were given the freedom to think broadly and creatively about child welfare, wouldn’t social workers engaged in this work be some of the most popular people on the planet? When their doorbells ring, parents in need might respond, “Thank goodness the child welfare worker has finally arrived! I’ve been waiting for you! What on earth took you so long?” Child welfare workers do not receive that kind of welcome—and are more typically greeted with suspicion by families, and with disdain or even pity by the larger community. When I interviewed to embark on my doctoral education, and told the interviewer how long I had been working in the field of child welfare, she shook her head and said, “That’s a burnout job. How have you managed to survive?”

Unfortunately, the trend toward creating large automated databases that can track system outcomes has not translated into the development of better programs or healthier communities for disadvantaged families. Anecdotal information from agency administrators who have worked in the field of child welfare for thirty years or more suggests that families entering the system today have more problems and are doing considerably worse compared with families that needed these services thirty years ago. Research supports these anecdotal reports of families in the system having more severe needs in recent years (Hohman et al., 2003; Marsh et al., 2006; Spratt and Devaney, 2009). We need to ask ourselves why this is the trend and what indicators would tell us that we are making progress solving that problem.

If creating national indicators of safety and permanency and demanding that states document progress toward meeting them has not resulted in recognizable benefits for children and families, perhaps we should consider changing what it means to be accountable. Why not change the indicators to reflect more comprehensive priorities, for example, those known to be key indicators of children’s well-being, especially poverty, education, and healthcare (www.childstats.gov)? What would it mean to shift the focus in child welfare practice from a crisis response to large-scale prevention in the interest of supporting the well-being of all families? Would it really cost more than what we spend today? Some researchers think not (Foster et al., 2008). What would it take to house programs in communities that respond to families and neighborhoods in ways that preempt crises (Fernandez, 2007)? And how might we engage other institutions (e.g., law and education) to help our professional colleagues understand this shift and its practical implications as we endeavor to make it? How might we move the field from one that is focused on families that are stigmatized to one that is focused on asset-based community capacity building and family support (Mannes, Roehlkepartain, and Benson, 2005)? When we evaluate our progress toward these kinds of goals, we will know we are moving in the right direction when the language being spoken by workers and administrators in public child welfare agencies is a language of hope that centers on the enhancement of health, happiness, and the general well-being of children, families, and communities. Shouldn’t that be what we mean when we talk about child welfare?

3. Radical listening refers to a process of inviting and attending to all aspects of the client’s story in order to understand their unique meanings. The worker focuses entirely on what the client is saying, listening for what is said and for what is not said, and tries to get into the client’s subjective experience of himself or herself in his or her world. The worker should try to listen without imposing diagnostic categories and other filters of cultural, generational, and sociopolitical differences (Wood and Tully, 2006).