Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Child Welfare Practice and Social Work Education

Social work in the field of child welfare is complex and full of challenges. In British Columbia Canada, the Ministry of Children and Family Development, which is the main employer of social workers, entered a partnership with universities to educate baccalaureate social work students in a child welfare specialization. This paper examines an instructional approach to child welfare education at the University of Northern British Columbia. The geography of the university region as well as the need to maintain a critical standpoint presented challenges in the delivery of a child welfare specialization course. The development of an online child welfare practice course assisted the university in meeting the challenges. This paper describes the practice context for social workers in British Columbia as well as the design of the online course offered to social work students at the University of Northern British Columbia.     

基于社会服务项目的儿童福利资源整合

当前,我国儿童福利资源存在资源匮乏、供给分散、可获得性弱等问题,而社会服务项目则是解决这些问题的一种路径。以福利治理为理论视角,尝试以一个留守儿童社会服务项目为例的研究发现,该项目通过不同形式的合作整合了来自政府、军队、群团组织、社会组织、企业、社区等资源,提高了福利资源的供给效率,满足了留守儿童多元化的福利需求,但是,由于项目本身的周期性、制度保障的缺乏等限制,导致了项目难以持续发挥作用。因此,基于社会服务项目的福利资源整合只是一种基于实践基础上的暂时的整合,而最根本的还需要在福利制度上进行整合。     

The Role of Social Workers in Welfare to Work Programs

Summary

Welfare to work is an important arena for understanding the changing nature of social policy and practice in Australia, the UK, Hong Kong, and the United States. This article discusses some key policy and practice issues in respect to social work professional training and practice. Welfare to work programs focus on “active” measures and stress the importance of “responsibilities” for all people of working age to support themselves through employment. The programs are being implemented in different ways across these different countries but in all cases the focus is increasingly on groups of people who may require substantial levels of assistance to meet their needs and to help them find and sustain employment.     

Finding and Keeping Child Welfare Workers

Summary

Administrators in public human services are constantly involved in the exhausting challenge of recruiting and training staff in the child welfare arena. This article describes a program that the Commonwealth of Kentucky developed in order to address the recruitment and retention issue. The Public Child Welfare Certification Program is a special multi-university preparation program designed to recruit excellent workers from BSW programs who are prepared to take on complex cases with normal supervision within weeks of employment and to sustain those workers over time. Evaluation of the pilot indicates that the program is a great success in preparing students for child welfare work. Implications are discussed.     

Child Care “Packaging” Among TANF Recipients: Implications for Social Work

This article reports the results of a study that examined the ways in which current and recent TANF recipients assembled or “packaged” their child care arrangements among formal and informal providers. The findings are drawn from in-person, in-depth interviews with current and former welfare recipients. The study found that most of the respondents used multiple providers within the category of informal child care for reasons including availability, the use of a network of social acquaintances as a problem-solving resource, the need to accommodate irregular work hours, and personal trauma that contributed to a distrust of strangers in formal settings. The findings can affect the efficacy of practice with TANF recipients by contributing to social workers’ understanding of the context of decision-making regarding child care.     

Power and Child Protection: The Need for a Child Welfare Service Users' Union or Association

Abstract

This paper reports a study in which parents who had received child protection intervention set out to develop a “Service Users' Guide” to help parents newly receiving intervention better understand and cope with the process. The study took place in Ontario, Canada between 2004–2009. Ninety-five parents took part in 13 focus groups and 20 individual interviews. A mix of Participatory Action and grounded theory methods were used to enable parents to develop their service uses guide. As the study progressed it quickly became evident that the biggest issue parents face when receiving intervention is an imbalance in power between themselves and workers. This paper describes the problems this power imbalance causes for parents and presents a potential solution suggested by parents themselves – the development of a child welfare service users' association or union. Parent's ideas about why this association is needed, how it could function, and the benefits it might bring, are discussed. The paper concludes by reviewing the benefits a service users' association might bring not only for those receiving child welfare intervention, but all social work services.     

Child Welfare Social Workers and Open Adoption Myths

Open adoption can have positive effects on the psychological well-being of adopted children. This study's purpose was to explore child welfare social workers' open adoption attitudes and their agreement with open adoption myths in predicting the relationship with their levels of openness toward open adoption. This study showed that open adoption attitudes, open adoption myths, and area of practice have an association with the levels of openness toward open adoption in a group of child welfare social workers. This information could be beneficial to policy makers and professionals who may be interested in increasing the facilitation of open adoption.     

An Examination of the Indian Child Welfare Act Section of State Title IV-B Child and Family Services Plans

The current study examined a nationwide sample of the ICWA section within state Title IV-B Child and Family Services Plans. Content analysis was performed to examine whether states were meeting ICWA mandates and federal requirements and interviews with regional/central Administration for Children and Families administrators and state officials were conducted. Major findings included ACF program instructions lacked detail and clarity as to what should be included, a majority of states reported consulting with tribes in the CFSP development, and over half of all state CFSPs did not reference any of the three specific measures outlined in ACF guidelines. Implications of findings are discussed and recommendations are offered to develop measurable outcomes to evaluate ICWA compliance and improve the federal monitoring processes.     

试论困境儿童的国家救助——以儿童福利理论为视角

困境儿童的救助工作是我国儿童福利事业发展中的重要组成部分。做好困境儿童的救助工作是党、政府、国家、社会和公民共同的责任,因此,必须把对困境儿童的救助工作提升到国家战略的角度来考虑。既要正确认识困境儿童群体的异质性,设计多元化的政策和服务,尽快建立和完善普惠型困境儿童救助政策体系,又要承认困境儿童的能力和优势,允许部分困境儿童自主地选择接受受助方式;还要以儿童视角来保障困境儿童游戏娱乐的权利。     

Child Welfare Services

Abstract

This paper highlights the problem of children being at risk for placement by public child welfare systems into substitute care. It focuses on one state, Illinois, which has had considerable success in reducing its caseload. Risk factors are hypothesized. It presents research involving regression analysis of data for the city of Chicago. A cross-sectional design is utilized for a division of the city into nine regions. Results indicate that children being wards of the state is impacted significantly by demographics (being African-American) and teen-age pregnancy. The effects of poverty were not as hypothesized. Further research is required.     

网络流行文化对大学生价值观的影响

流行文化首先属于媒介文化,是网民在不同的网络设备上分享由他们自己创造并将在很长一段时间内保持的某种价值观念和看法。网络流行文化重构了现代社会交往方式,呈现出泛娱乐化的倾向,虽然流行时间短,更新快,所指在不断变化,但是其能指却是恒定不变的。网络流行文化成为大学生活的重要组成部分,也深刻地影响着大学生价值观的形成,他们在价值观方面呈现出了价值取向多元化、价值主体自我化、价值选择迷惘化、价值态度消极化的时代特征。为此有必要对大学生进行媒介素养教育、闲暇教育以及大学生责任意识教育。     

Preparing for Child Welfare Practice

Summary

Specialized child welfare MSW programs and stipend support for child welfare MSW students have been developed in several states through the Federal Title IV-E program. Thirty-seven focus groups conducted over four years with approximately 550 Title IV-E MSW students in California were submitted to qualitative thematic analysis. The intense emotional challenge of child welfare work emerged in the focus groups. A three stage cognitive-affective model of student development is proposed. This exploratory study suggests several hypotheses for further research: that students at more advanced cognitive-affective levels should be less prone to burnout, better able to make the difficult value-based decisions demanded by child welfare work, and more likely to integrate and use the emotions of themselves and others. Implications are explored for graduate programs, professors, and supervisors.     

Social Media and Social Work: The Challenges of a New Ethical Space

ABSTRACT

Social media and other online technologies have transformed communication between social workers and service users, with many practitioners engaging and working with clients through social networking sites. While there are numerous ethical issues associated with online practice related to con?dentiality, dual relationships, and boundary crossing, there is lack of clarity about how to deal with such issues. This article uses a case example to develop a nuanced understanding of ethical issues and ethical behaviour in online spaces. We argue that social workers need to link their knowledge of the complex interplay between discourses that underpin daily practice like those related to power, permanency, authorship, audience, embodiment, and professionalism to social media created spaces. In doing this, social workers must retain their commitment to ethical values and critical reflective practice. We conclude with recommendations for education, research, and practice.     

Welfare to Work in the United Kingdom

Summary

Increasing employment and reducing child poverty are two central goals of current government welfare reform policy in the UK, and single parentswith their relatively low employment rates and relatively high poverty ratesare one of the key target groups for both. This article outlines welfare reform policies in the UK with particular reference to single parents, and discusses the impact of these. In doing so, it highlights some key differences compared with the US.     

Social Workers and PACs

Abstract

This paper examines the role of state Political Action for Candidate Election committees during the 1992 election cycle and assesses the extent that these state committees carried out their identified purpose. Using a survey questionnaire of the state chapters' executive directors, the authors examine the structure of the P.A.C.E. units and the activities they undertook, and assess the overall level of effectiveness of P.A.C.E. efforts at the state level. While P.A.C.E. activities were significant, considerable development is needed at the local, state, and national levels to increase the impact of social workers relative to other interest groups.     

Fathers' encounters with the Child Welfare Service

In this article, we examined fathers who were or had been in contact with the Child Welfare Services in Norway. All of the fathers included in this study had children with women who were unable to take care of them, either because of substance abuse or mental health problems. Hence, the fathers had the primary responsibility for the children. We looked at how these fathers experienced being met and assessed as caregivers by the Child Welfare Service, as well as how they experienced their own competency as caregivers. To explore these themes, seven fathers who were in contact with or had recently been in contact with the Child Welfare Service were interviewed. The discourses on fatherhood, inspired by Scourfield (2003), were used as a framework for the analysis, and interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA) was used to analyse the interviews. We found the fathers' experiences to be considered within the discourses on “fathers as a threat”, “fathers as irrelevant” and “fathers as better than mothers”. In addition, we shed light on topics such as the cultural lag, being single-handedly responsible for the children, and the fathers' views on what is important in their contact with the children.Our goal was to increase awareness about fathers who are in contact with the Child Welfare Service so that they are met in a way that helps to support them in their role as fathers for the benefit of their children.     

Integrating Couple Teamwork Conversations Into Child Welfare Practice

This article summarizes the importance of and challenges to addressing couple teamwork issues in the child welfare population. Although there is substantial evidence to support the importance of healthy adult relationships for child well-being and the prevention of child maltreatment, there are a number of barriers to addressing these couple relationships in child welfare. These barriers include diverse family configurations and uncertain relationship commitments, the individual presentation of maltreatment, and worker discomfort with these issues. Additionally, there are few relationship programs designed specifically for low income individuals, and a number of policy and environmental constraints affect couple relationships in this population. However, building upon a comprehensive practice model for child welfare known as Solution Based Casework, this article describes casework skills to initiate and maintain couple teamwork conversations. These initiation skills include assessing patterns in everyday life, building partnerships with families, normalizing and externalizing problems, and tracking interactional sequences related to parent teamwork. The maintenance skills described include maintaining a common language, utilizing family team meetings, recognizing small steps of change, keeping treatment providers on track, and making the most of setbacks. These practical guidelines will assist child welfare professionals with building couple teamwork for child protection.     

Preparing Social Work Students for Rural Child Welfare Practice: Emerging Curriculum Competencies

Multiple issues that are unique to child welfare social work practice in rural areas markedly affect workforce recruitment and retention, yet little attention is given to the proficiencies needed to equip emerging social workers for this growing area of the field. Curriculum content is needed that provides students with the opportunity to master the skills needed to thrive as child welfare social workers in rural areas. Using an evidence-based practice critical thinking model as a guide, a systematic review of literature and documents addresses many of the competencies needed to prepare social work students for child welfare practice in rural areas. These competencies are identified. Suggestions for integration into the social work curriculum are offered.     

Practice Change in Child Welfare: The Interface of Training and Social Work Education

This article examines perceptions of the relationship between professional education and workplace training among a select group of public child welfare employees who pursued graduate social work education during a period of major practice change at their agency. Focus groups were conducted with representative members of graduating cohorts as students completed their studies to explore the connections and distinctions between their professional education and the workplace training that introduced case practice reform. Experienced caseworkers, supervisors, and management-level staff, study participants were well situated to contemplate the changes in process at their agency. They offered insights into the progress of reform and the challenges of sustaining change as well as their roles as professional social workers in carrying reforms forward.     

The Restorative Power of Emotions in Child Protection Services

The paper examines the significance of our emotional life for validation, enrichment and guidance in everyday behavior. Child protection services (CPS) workers need to understand how emotions affect family dynamics and, in particular, parental behavior as a basis for their work with families. Moreover, in order for CPS workers to be aware of, and professionally responsive to, the importance of a family's emotions requires that they are comfortable with their own feelings. This means that they need to work in CPS agencies which recognize and support this practice orientation. The paper also addresses how the agency can influence CPS workers to become more knowledgeable and attuned to, not only the families' emotional lives, but also to their own.