Let's Fix America's Children

The issues that I would like to see addressed in our children’s welfare services are the poor prognoses of minors who “graduate” the system into adulthood, the impermanence of safe placements for dependent minors, and the obvious disproportionate number of black and other minority children in the system compared to white children.

Ultimately, one must advocate for the child. That child might be 3 months old or 17 years and 9 months old. That child might be white, black, Asian or Hispanic. No matter what, that child is a child, and our government has decided that the child has no rights to make personal decisions regarding his/ her living circumstances until the minimum age of 18. That means that the government has accepted total responsibility for the quality of life of that child.

When a child is made a dependent of the state, how is that child supposed to learn how to be independent? This is the same question people have asked in regards to financial assistance to the poor. Does government aid create dependency on the government? According to the evidence gathered so far, I can honestly answer yes. The most extreme example of this that I have encountered on a personal level are my interactions with children who have become so accustomed to institutional living that they have come to “crave” (in their own words) being physically restrained in order to stop them from harming themselves or others.

The reality is that the problem that children’s welfare systems attempt to address is far greater than what an institution can comprehend or fix. Replacing parents with a team of professional staff does little to “normalize” a child. What happens is that children, who crave and need attention and affirmation in any form, learn very quickly that the environments they find themselves in are impermanent and unpredictable, and the workers in those environments, no matter how well-intentioned, are a poor substitute for the unconditional, parental love that every child needs and deserves.

What is the answer? I think that the answer lies in continued efforts to reach out to the community, raising awareness, and asking Americans to take up the cause of our unwanted children. I would push for fewer restrictions on people and families who want to adopt. I would work to eliminate obstacles to gay people or families adopting children in need. I see sex education as a very important preventative measure in terms of reducing the number of abused, abandoned and neglected children. I find it disturbing that people spend tens of thousands of dollars on alternative means of having children while we have such a surplus of unwanted children.

I think that the government should work harder at accommodating people who are willing to adopt, perhaps providing services and incentives, and work less at protecting the abusing family the child was born into. I think that negligence should be treated differently than abuse, and those found guilty of negligence should be provided with intensive education before the child is removed from the home. For those guilty of hard abuse, I think that there should be more emphasis on rehabilitating the child than the abusive family.

Finally, I think there needs to be more individualized vs. standardized treatment of children and families. There needs to be more “wriggle room” for social service agents who feel one way, but are forced to act another way by policies and procedures. I think that each and every child should be viewed as an individual, and that they deserve advocates who are solely out for their own benefit. In the current system, oftentimes social workers are torn in their loyalty between the victim and perpetrator, or child and family. If every worker was given the sole responsibility of deciding on what is best for the child, I think we would see a better outcome for many of these children, especially when looking at the long term, or into their transition into adulthood. I also think that this approach would minimize the disparity between racial groups in the system.

One thing I have proposed in previous discussions is specialization of group homes that would allow group homes to function as environments designed to meet specific challenges that children in the system face. For instance, instead of having every home struggling to meet the variety of needs presented by their clients, each home would be specifically designed to meet the needs of their residents. The only way to accomplish this is to allow for assessment of and individual planning for children with special needs. Instead of having homes that house children with severe behavioral disturbances along with gang members and pregnant teens, as well as relatively “normal” children who lack any ancillary need, we could have homes that specialize in meeting the needs of these subgroups specifically. Children would be placed in homes that are designed to meet their individual needs, such as one home for children who suffer from eating disorders, another for pregnant teens, and another for children with severe behavioral disorders.

I have heard the voice of criticism in regards to this idea, the most prominent one being, “How will this allow or enhance the ability of the individuals served to assimilate back into the mainstream where there is no specialization?” My answer is that these children are already outside of the realm of “mainstream.” Group home and foster home living are not “mainstream,” and what we are currently seeing is the phenomenon of “institutionalization,” where individuals are reared to be dependent on a system. If we actually focused on those individual needs we might have a chance at bringing these kids to a place of self-sufficiency.